<Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed an executive order on Monday requiring all Louisiana government agencies that hand out voter registration forms to include a written declaration that non-citizens are prohibited from registering to vote or voting in elections.

“The right to vote in United States elections is a privilege that’s reserved for American citizens,” Landry said during the Monday press conference. “In Louisiana, election integrity is a top priority.”

Louisiana is just the most recent state to implement measures to ensure that individuals who are not American citizens are not voting in U.S. elections, even though there is simply no evidence to suggest that non-citizen voting is a real problem.

It is, of course, already illegal for non-citizens to vote in state, federal or even most local elections, and states themselves have measures in place to protect their elections from non-citizen voting, including severe penalties for doing so, like the risk of deportation.

“It is not something that anyone has an incentive to do given the severe penalties and the fact that we’re talking about casting a single vote,” Alice Clapman, senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights Program, previously told TPM. “It is feeding the disinformation that this is a problem, which obviously has become a talking point of the Trump campaign and frankly other political campaigns.”

In the rare instances where a non-citizen is found on the rolls, there is often a reasonable explanation, experts told TPM. For example, in states with automatic voter registration, there’s always a chance that non-citizens might accidentally get registered when completing other types of legal paperwork, even though they never attempted to vote.

Republicans’ new obsession with supposedly curbing alleged non-citizens voting is an extension of the rhetorical efforts by Donald Trump and his MAGA allies to stoke fears about election fraud in case the former president loses his third bid for the White House. It’s reminiscent of his efforts before and after the 2020 election to manufacture hysteria around mail-in voting and other pandemic mitigation measures, and in a way, it’s an extension of the Big Lie.

​​In May, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and other House MAGA Republicans introduced the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which would make it illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections, an act that is already illegal. That passed the House in July but, predictably, was not picked up by the Democratic-controlled Senate.

Emboldened by Trump and House Republicans, red state officials have begun putting out public announcements and executive orders highlighting the supposed work they are doing to remove thousands of non-citizens from voter rolls — while also intentionally avoiding specifics about their methodology or whether any of these individuals actually tried to vote.

Earlier this month, the Alabama secretary of state, announced the implementation of a process to remove alleged non-citizens from the voter rolls. In that announcement, he noted that he had identified over 3,000 non-citizens on the voter rolls “who are registered to vote in Alabama who have been issued non-citizen identification numbers by the Department of Homeland Security.”

In the same announcement, he admitted “it is possible that some of the individuals who were issued non-citizen identification numbers have, since receiving them, become naturalized citizens and are, therefore, eligible to vote.”

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin also signed an executive order, announcing the removal of over 6,000 alleged non-citizens from the voter rolls in August. The order, however, did not mention if these alleged non-citizens ever cast a ballot in an election.

Similarly, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R) recently announced that county boards of elections across the state were instructed to remove 499 alleged non-citizen from the voter rolls, out of the 8 million registered voters in the state.>

<One of Vice President Kamala Harris’s first policy proposals after formally securing the Democratic nomination for president was to support ending federal income taxes on tips. Former president Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, immediately cried foul, saying she stole an idea that he announced in June. Harris announced her proposal earlier this month in Nevada, a battleground state with a gaming and hospitality industry where many workers receive much of their income in tips.

This Trump ad, which earned 8 million views within 48 hours of being posted on X, is intended to suggest Harris is simply playing politics and has no intention of eliminating taxes on tips. With images of actors portraying IRS agents in dark suits and sunglasses invading a person’s home, the ad accuses the Biden administration of having “literally unleashed the IRS to harass workers who receive tips.”

This is all false.

Though Harris embraced the idea after Trump, she has released more details of her tip plan than her opponent. She would impose a cap on earnings, perhaps $75,000, to prevent upper-income workers from seeking to declare some income as tips. She would also not exempt Social Security and Medicare taxes from being collected. The Trump campaign has refused to clarify whether tip income would be exempt from payroll taxes, and the ad says “only President Trump has a plan that ends all taxes on service workers’ tips.” That suggests he wouldn’t have the government collect those taxes, either.

Dean Baker, a Social Security expert and senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said that would mean substantially lower Social Security benefits for workers who rely on tips, which could have a big impact because people receive much more of their earnings in retirement benefits at lower wages. “If not counting tipped income reduces their average lifetime earnings by $3,000, it would reduce their yearly Social Security benefits in retirement by $2,700, or $225 a month,” he wrote on X.

As for the ad, it uses a classic attack-ad tactic — citing an obscure bureaucratic proposal to make wild allegations. We had to consult with four tax experts and industry officials to even begin to understand what was going on.

The ad relies on an IRS announcement in February 2023 that it was seeking comment on a proposal to consolidate three voluntary tip reporting programs into one called the Service Industry Tip Compliance Agreement (SITCA). The federal government for decades has sought to tax tip income, but because tips were largely in cash, it was complicated for both employees and employers. Even though wait staff might receive most of the tips, they often share a portion of their tips with workers in the kitchen or at the front desk. The programs used formulas to calculate what all employees should be earning in tips, with taxes applied accordingly.

Since 2013, the IRS has tried to come up with a new system that streamlined the process and took advantage of new point-of-sale technologies that collect data on tips. After all, Americans increasingly do not use cash to pay for restaurant bills, including tips, and rely instead on credit cards or payment apps. This data makes it easier to determine what an average worker’s tip would be. A study conducted by the Trump administration found that nearly $1.7 billion in tip income had not been reported in 2016.

“It’s pretty good the IRS put this out for comment,” said Nina Olson, executive director of the Center for Taxpayer Rights and a former IRS taxpayer advocate. “The whole point of the proposal is to reduce the number of audits that would need to be done.”

SITCA, like the programs it would replace, would be voluntary. The IRS received comments on the initial draft, and industry officials say the agency has not signaled any intent to enact SITCA.

In fact, the plan has been shelved.

“Treasury and the IRS have no plans to move forward with the voluntary program and, as such, there are no new reporting or compliance components,” Treasury spokeswoman Ashley Schapitl told The Fact Checker. “We continue to carefully consider comments received in response to the proposed guidance.”

The ad, however, falsely claims the proposal has already been implemented, with such lines as: “Biden and Harris have literally unleashed the IRS to harass workers who receive tips.”

Nope, that’s false....>

<....The ad also tries to project verisimilitude by claiming “news reports confirm” that the Biden administration “weaponized the IRS to confiscate your tip money.” The citations are from conservative news organizations or interest groups in 2023. They were echoing talking points released by House Republicans in 2023 eager to claim that Biden had violated his pledge not to increase audits of people making less than $400,000. The pledge was made after the IRS received an influx of tens of billions of dollars to improve service and boost audits of wealthy Americans.

Last month, the IRS said that as result of the additional resources, it has collected $1 billion in back taxes from about 1,500 delinquent millionaires and billionaires.

Olson said the images in the ad were especially misleading because criminal investigators — the IRS agents who invade homes — are not in the business of conducting audits and because about 85 percent of audits are a letter from the IRS asking for more information.

The Trump campaign noted that the lowest wage earners are audited at a much higher rate than the wealthy. But the report it cited attributed that problem to the IRS being starved of funds and unable to hire enough agents. (This was before Biden obtained $80 billion from Congress for the agency.) In a September letter to Congress, IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said the agency was seeking to reduce correspondence audits of people who took advantage of tax credits aimed at lower-income workers.

In a statement, the Trump campaign falsely accused the Biden administration of wanting to hire “an army of 87,000 new IRS agents” (a Four-Pinocchio claim) and insisted Harris and Biden “want this newly empowered IRS to target tipped workers.”

To recap, the Trump campaign claims Harris can’t be trusted on her no-tax tip plan because the IRS proposed a plan to streamline three programs to help employers calculate tip income. But the proposal has been shelved. So, leaving aside the exaggerations about what the proposal would do, it’s simply false to claim Harris “literally unleashed the IRS to harass workers who receive tips.”

The Trump campaign earns Four Pinocchios.>

<In the latest audio recording to resurface, Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance can once again be heard going after women without children as somehow being harmful to other people’s kids.

“So many of the leaders of the left, and I hate to be so personal about this, but they’re people without kids trying to brainwash the minds of our children,” Vance said at a 2021 Center for Christian Virtue forum, in audio unearthed by nonprofit Chicagoland radio station WCPT820.

Vance, Donald Trump’s 2024 running mate, went on to slam American Federation of Teachers boss Randi Weingarten, insisting: “[S]he doesn’t have a single child. If she wants to brainwash and destroy the minds of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone."

The freshman senator, Yale-educated lawyer and former venture capitalist, first lobbed a widely derided slur about women who had never given birth during a 2021 interview with then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson. He lamented that the US was under the control of “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

Vance went on to slam Vice President and Democratic presidential contender Kamala Harris, Transportation Secretray Pete Buttigieg, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a cabal “without children,” who shouldn’t be making decisions for others.

“How does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?” Vance asked Carlson.

Vance didn’t limit the “cat ladies” insult to women, either. Also in 2021, Vance took aim at economist Paul Krugman, tweeting: “Paul Krugman is one of many weird cat ladies who have too much power in our country. We should change this.”

Vance has also argued that those without children should pay higher taxes and have diminished voting rights. His offensive remarks have been met with outrage along with people sharing their personal stories.

Former Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords, who was shot in the head in a 2011 assassination attempt, posted on X that she and astronaut husband Senator Mark Kelly, a VP shortlister before Harris chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, had tried and failed to conceive via IVF.

“To suggest we are somehow lesser is disgraceful,” Giffords posted.

Actress Jennifer Aniston also slammed Vance for his insensitivity to women struggling to conceive, posting to social media that she hoped Vance’s own daughter is “fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day.”

“I hope she will not need to turn to IVF as a second option,” Aniston said. “Because you are trying to take that away from her, too.”

Vance responded and called Aniston’s take “disgusting.”

At the Democratic National Convention earlier this month, Oprah Winfrey made a dig at Vance by saying that if a house was on fire that happened to belong to a “childless cat lady,” she’d still try to save her and her pet.

On Sunday, Vance tried to walk back his comments, saying during an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press: “I made a sarcastic comment years ago that I think that a lot of Democrats have willfully misinterpreted.”

He said he had “a lot of regrets,” but that “a joke three years ago is not at the top 10 of the list.”>

<Allies of Donald Trump are using an unusual new Arizona law to urge a judge to throw out a criminal case charging them with fraudulently trying to overturn the state's 2020 presidential election result.

The law they’re citing was designed to stop prosecutors from bringing flimsy cases out of political animus. The defendants now trying to harness it include former Trump legal adviser John Eastman and other Trump confidants, as well as Arizona Republicans who falsely claimed that Trump won Arizona and held themselves out as the state's legitimate electors in the Electoral College.

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat who took office in 2023, brought the case in April. Trump was identified as an unindicted co-conspirator.

At an all-day hearing in Maricopa County Superior Court on Monday, Judge Bruce Cohen signaled openness to the defendants' arguments for the charges to be tossed out under Arizona's so-called anti-SLAPP law. If Cohen finds that the arguments have merit, he could order a further hearing to gather evidence about the defendants' claims of political persecution.

Like many states, Arizona has long had on its books an anti-SLAPP law — which stands for "strategic lawsuits against public participation." These laws are typically designed to discourage vindictive and frivolous civil lawsuits against people exercising their First Amendment rights. But in 2022, Arizona’s Legislature expanded the law’s purview to include protection from politically motivated criminal prosecutions as well. It is the only anti-SLAPP law in the United States to offer such protection.

Prosecutors working for Mayes told the judge that the defendants’ claims of politically motivated prosecution are wrong-headed and offensive. And they signaled that, if the case goes to trial, they plan to depict the defendants’ alleged crimes to jurors in exhaustive detail: They intend to call as many as 80 witnesses during a trial that could last three months.

The trial is scheduled to begin in January 2026.

In addition to Eastman and the so-called fake electors, other defendants include Rudy Giuliani, Trump's former personal lawyer; Mark Meadows, Trump's former White House chief of staff; Boris Epshteyn, a close legal adviser to Trump; and Christina Bobb, a Republican Party lawyer focused on elections. One fake elector has pleaded guilty, and another defendant — lawyer Jenna Ellis — agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. The other defendants have pleaded not guilty.

By invoking the anti-SLAPP law, the defendants argue that they lawfully exercised their First Amendment rights in the aftermath of the 2020 election, and that Mayes’ prosecution is retaliatory. The anti-SLAPP law allows them to seek to have the criminal case dismissed quickly — assuming they can convince the judge that they have been charged under a legal theory that is not "clearly established."

The law itself is so untested that, in court on Monday, lawyers couldn’t even agree on its acronym. There are 16 defendants in the case, and their lawyers crowded into the courtroom, with many sitting in the jury box because there wasn’t enough room elsewhere. After one of the first mentions of the law, Richard Jones — a goateed lawyer in a pink blazer who represents former Arizona Republican Party head Gregory Safsten — said the law now covered all legal “action,” not just lawsuits, and suggested a new acronym.

“From here on out, we should be referring to these as anti-SAAPP,” he said, dramatically elongating the last syllable.

Cohen did not rule on the defendants' bid for an evidentiary hearing on their political persecution claims. He was scheduled to hear further arguments on Tuesday.

A lawyer for defendant Jim Lamon, one of the fake electors, argued that the actions described in the indictment weren't actually illegal. The document Lamon signed purporting to be a “duly elected” Trump elector wasn’t fraudulent when put into proper context, the lawyer, Dennis Wilenchik, argued. He said the word “elected” can be used interchangeably with the word “appointed,” and there was no dispute that the state Republican Party chose Lamon as one of its electors. And, he added, Lamon believed the document he signed was merely a backup in case a court determined that Trump had defeated Joe Biden....>

<....Lamon and his cohorts in Arizona, like numerous other Republican activists in swing states that Biden won in 2020, signed paperwork on Dec. 14 of that year claiming to be lawfully chosen presidential electors. The paperwork in Pennsylvania and New Mexico included language indicating that the documents were contingent on court challenges. But in Arizona, the paperwork didn’t have any language saying it was contingent. And prosecutors argued that, in fact, it wasn’t contingent — that the electors instead participated in a scheme to create fraudulent documents that could be used to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence into rejecting the election results on Jan. 6, 2021.

At one point during Monday's hearing, the judge asked whether Arizona's Republican-controlled Legislature had passed the expanded anti-SLAPP law specifically in anticipation of charges against the Republican fake electors.

Michael Columbo, an attorney representing state Sen. Jake Hoffman, said he didn’t have inside information on why the law was passed. But he noted that Arizona’s political climate has become intense.

“Being dragged into a prosecution can be financially devastating,” he said. “It will destroy your reputation. It can wreck families."

"There's a prudence" to a law that allows defendants to resolve their First Amendment defense early in a case, well before it reaches a jury, Columbo added.

Columbo and other defense lawyers argued that there are enough signs that the attorney general acted out of political animus to justify an evidentiary hearing on the issue under the anti-SLAPP law. They have noted that Mayes promised to investigate the fake electors during her campaign for attorney general, alleging they “videotaped their crime for all to see.”

They also noted that her top deputy posted a message on the platform X appearing to gloat about Giuliani being served with the indictment at his birthday party.

Cohen, the judge, sounded open to their arguments on Monday, and began discussions about when an evidentiary hearing could take place and what such a hearing would look like.

Stephen Binhak, a lawyer for Arizona Republican leader Tyler Bowyer, said the new anti-SLAPP law represents “a fundamental sea change in how criminal law works.”>

<Republicans' advantage in a key Arizona county's voter registration has surged since 2020, as the state remains hotly contested in the 2024 race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.

Arizona is a crucial swing state in this year's election. It narrowly backed President Joe Biden in 2020 after voting for Republicans in every other presidential race since 2000. Polls show a tight race in the state since Harris emerged as the Democratic nominee, replacing Biden amid concerns about whether he could mount a successful presidential campaign to beat Trump in November.

Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, the state's largest city, will be crucial to how Arizona votes in November. It will be one of the most watched counties in the United States in November. Over half of Arizonans live in Maricopa County, and Democrats' strong showing in the county delivered the state to Biden in 2020.

Biden won Maricopa County by about two points while winning statewide by only 0.3 percentage points. Biden carried the county and the state primarily due to making inroads with independent suburban voters who may determine the election outcome again.

However, new voter registration data from Arizona suggests that Democrats have slipped in the county since 2020, while Republicans have made gains in the number of voters who identify with their party.

The July 30 data found that 692,294 voters in Maricopa County identified as Democrats, 851,227 identified as Republicans, and more than 800,000 others identified with another party or as independents.

Data released on August 4, 2020, showed that 764,774 voters identified as Democrats, while 849,313 identified as Republicans. In a four-year period, 72,480 voters changed their affiliation away from Democrats, while Republicans gained 1,914 new voters in the same time period.

Newsweek reached out to the Harris and Trump campaigns for comment via email.

Notably, more than 800,000 voters in the county still don't identify as either a Democrat or a Republican. They will be crucial in the upcoming election as Harris and Trump battle for support among these swing voters.

Republicans have an advantage in the statewide voter registration numbers, but polls still suggest a close race between Harris and Trump.

Across the state, about 1.29 million voters are registered Democrats, 1.39 million are registered Republicans, and 1.3 million are not registered with either party.

A New York Times/Siena College poll conducted among 677 likely voters from August 8 to August 15 found Harris with a 5-point lead over Trump in Arizona (50 percent to 45 percent).

Meanwhile, a Noble Predictive Insights survey conducted among 1,003 registered voters from August 12 to August 16 found Trump leading by three points (47 percent to 44 percent).

FiveThirtyEight's polling aggregate shows the race nearly tied, with Harris holding only a narrow 0.8-point lead over Trump. An average from RealClearPolitics gives Harris a 0.6-point advantage.>

<The Republican National Committee is going on offense in the heat of campaign season, involving itself in election-related legal fights in several battleground states as ballots are finalized and early voting is around the corner.

The RNC filed an emergency application before the Supreme Court in Arizona this month over noncitizens voting and saw a partial victory. The committee just brought a lawsuit in Detroit because it wanted more Republicans watching over polling locations. And a lawsuit the RNC brought in North Carolina this week is one of many legal fights playing out over how states manage their voter rolls.

The legal battles are being driven by the RNC’s election integrity program, the largest-scale initiative of its kind for the committee after a consent decree dramatically limited the RNC from partaking in election security activity from the 1980s until 2018.

For the 2024 election, the RNC has enlisted tens of thousands of volunteers, including a swath of attorneys, to participate in what it describes as "protecting the vote." Claire Zunk, a spokeswoman for the election integrity program, confirmed that the committee was, as of August, involved in more than 100 lawsuits “and counting” as part of its program.

"We are stopping Democrat [sic] election interference schemes in real time,” Zunk told the Washington Examiner.

Often Republicans at the national and state level find themselves at odds with Democrats in election litigation. A common refrain from Republicans is that Democrats are threatening election fairness and making it easier to commit fraud by trying to do away with voting safeguards. Democrats, on the other hand, argue that Republicans are trying to make it harder to vote and causing disenfranchisement.

High-powered attorney Marc Elias, who has for years been at the forefront of Democratic election litigation, dismissed Republicans’ court battles as an attempt to manipulate rules to keep power because they do not, in Elias’s view, hold a majority of voter support and cannot win if more people can vote.

“While Democrat and progressive lawyers like myself and others are in court trying to expand voting rights, protect drop boxes, allow for people to register, those things, they’re in court trying to allow their henchmen and vigilantes to intimidate voters and harass election officials,” Elias said during a recent podcast.

Below is a look at some of the RNC's recent election legal fights playing out across the country.

Arizona

The Supreme Court granted the RNC’s emergency request to the court this month to allow Arizona election officials to require proof of citizenship from people registering to vote using a state form.

The ruling was a partial win for the RNC amid worries about noncitizens voting in a battleground state that has been ravaged by illegal immigration.

But the high court also handed a victory to Democrats and the Department of Justice, who argued to the justices that federal forms available for Arizonans to register to vote already require them to sign off that they are citizens and that requiring documentation of citizenship, such as a driver's license, was redundant. The Supreme Court said that if a voter has registered to vote using the federal form and did not provide a document proving citizenship, that voter could still apply for an absentee ballot and vote in federal races, just not in state and local races.

Michigan

The RNC filed a lawsuit in Wayne County last week, arguing the Midwestern metropolis violated a “parity requirement” in the Michigan primary by having a lopsided number of Democratic poll workers, known as “election inspectors,” at hundreds of polling places.

The RNC argued that Detroit’s election commission appointed 2,337 Democratic election inspectors and 310 Republican election inspectors “despite the fact that qualified Republicans applied or were identified but were not pursue or selected,” according to the legal complaint.

The RNC has asked the court to require Wayne County to follow procedures that force it to reach parity more closely at polling places....>

<....North Carolina

The RNC brought a lawsuit against the North Carolina State Board of Elections this week, asking a court to order the board to address more than 225,000 voters on its rolls who registered without providing state-required identification.

North Carolina’s voter rolls are “potentially replete with ineligible voters—including possible non-citizens—all of whom are now registered to vote,” attorneys for the Republicans wrote.

While there is no evidence that the registered voters who did not meet the state's identification requirement were, in fact, ineligible to vote, the Republicans have argued that the mere possibility of ineligible voters being registered puts North Carolina’s election integrity “in jeopardy” and that a court should force the election board to correct the matter.

The lawsuit was the second from the RNC in as many weeks directed at the North Carolina election board related to voter rolls, a pursuit that Elias called "ridiculous."

"This is just an effort by Republicans to inject further lies and misinformation into the system to explain to their voters why when they lose in November they lost,” he said.

Georgia

The competitive purple state was ground zero for election fraud claims in 2020, and many eyes across the political spectrum are once again on the state ahead of what is expected to be another nail-biting presidential contest.

While the Georgia Election Board's recent implementation of modified election certification rules has invited a lawsuit from Democrats, national and state Republicans have intervened in a separate legal case brought by the New Georgia Project, a left-leaning group founded by voting activist and twice-failed Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.

The RNC argued in its request this month to intervene in the lawsuit that it was pushing for "accurate voter-registration lists" after the New Georgia Project moved to halt enforcement of Georgia's election law provisions that allow officials to purge voter rolls.

"We continue to fight for clean voter rolls, stopping Kamala from using our tax dollars to benefit her campaign, making sure states follow election law, and fixing the existing threats in our election system," Zunk said of the RNC's lawsuits. "Our unprecedented operation is committed to securing the election and fighting to protect the vote for all Americans.">

Odd, is not how these suits never come up in clearly red or blue states, or well in advance, when there is plenty of time to put matters right, but are always eleventh-hour manoeuvres.

<Claim:

An image shows U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris' membership card to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Rating:

Fake

Context:

The image purportedly sourced from Soviet archives actually comes from a website that allows anyone to create Soviet-era identification cards.

In late August 2024, a purported photo of a membership card identifying U.S. presidential candidate Kamala Harris as a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was shared on multiple social media platforms and websites:

The image was often shared alongside a photograph of printed text explaining that the membership card was "a unique document" recently released by the State Archives of the Russian Federation:

On August 19, the official Telegram channel of the State Archives of the Russian Federation (GARF) published the CPSU party card of US presidential candidate Camille [sic] Harris, which she received during her first visit to the USSR in 1984.

It turned out that the American politician at the age 16 joined the Communist Party of the USA and in the mid-1980s she came to Moscow and Voronezh at least three times through the All-Union Komsomol Organization.

"To dispel all the controversy surrounding Comrade Harris, today we will publish a unique document from our archival fund - her party card, which was personally presented by the second secretary of the Komsomol in June 1984," senior researcher at GARF Matvey Streltsov told reporters.

Harris herself refused to comment, but according to The New York Times, her campaign headquarters will not demand a refutation - the US presidential candidate was indeed a member of the CPSU and paid party dues until 1991.

These claims have no basis in reality. The documentary evidence provided as proof that Harris is or was a communist — this alleged Soviet-era membership card — is actually conclusive proof of a forgery.

Images of purported CPSU membership cards carrying the same ID number and payment record (the columns on the right side of the image) have been shared on social media for nearly a decade. That's because it's the number used on an image produced by a Russian website that allows users to put anyone's name and face on such a card — about as far from "a unique document" as one could get:

The photograph used in the Harris forgery, which was purportedly from 1984, was taken at Howard University in 1986. There is no evidence outside of this forgery that Harris traveled to the Soviet Union or joined any communist organizations at this time.

A search performed by Snopes of recent New York Times articles about Harris revealed that no articles match the one described in social media posts as additional evidence for the legitimacy of the claim.

Because this image originated from a website that produces variants of the same "membership card" used in this claim and not, as alleged, the State Archives of the Russian Federation, the claim is rated as a "Fake."

Snopes has written several stories about similar false claims concerning Harris' and her campaign's alleged support of communism.>

<On February 27, 2013, just a few hours after Solicitor General Donald Verrilli endeavored to protect the Voting Rights Act before the US Supreme Court, he dropped by his boss’s office and told US Attorney General Eric Holder that arguments in the case, Shelby County v. Holder, had gone poorly.

Verrilli warned Holder things might be worse than they feared: The court intended to go after the entirety of preclearance, the VRA’s most crucial enforcement mechanism. Holder scarcely believed that could be possible.

“The Voting Rights Act? Come on,” Holder said. But to the veteran solicitor general, recovering from the most brutal experience he’d ever had before the court, the writing was on the wall.

“I walked out of that courtroom certain that’s what was going to happen,” Verrilli told me. “I was never optimistic at all.”

Verrilli had underestimated how meticulously John Roberts had planned for this moment. He never imagined that he’d be hit with such mendacious numbers and arguments in a sanctum he revered. And though his pessimism turned out to be abundantly justified, the dishonest reasoning behind Roberts’s decision—that the chief justice could just conjure a doctrine of his own creation and use it to eviscerate the most important civil rights legislation in the nation’s history—haunts the solicitor general to this day. It has remade American democracy as well.

John Roberts had schemed for decades prior to this moment. Three years earlier, a test case known as Northwest Austin allowed Roberts to carefully plant the seeds for the challenge that foes of voting rights law mounted in Shelby County. A tiny municipal water board in a new Texas development posed a large constitutional question. The VRA’s preclearance regime required every locality in the state to approve in advance any changes to voting procedures through the Department of Justice. Preclearance worked to right historical wrongs: The VRA mandated it in the handful of states and localities with the worst records of racial discrimination in elections; when Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act by near-unanimous margins in 2006, it relied on a record of ongoing modern chicanery stretching toward 14,000 pages, bearing eloquent testimony to the ongoing need for preclearance.

Two lower federal courts had agreed that the utility district did not qualify for exemption from the VRA, and that preclearance itself remained a proportionate response by Congress. “The racial disparities revealed in the 2006 legislative record differ little from what Congress found in 1975,” wrote federal appeals Judge David Tatel. “In view of this extensive legislative record and the deference we owe Congress, we see no constitutional basis for rejecting Congress’s considered judgment.”

Before Tatel wrote his decision, he read every page of the 2006 congressional report, and tracked the stories of canceled elections and last-second precinct switches across Mississippi, Louisiana and other covered states. He did so, he told me, because “I had no confidence that the Supreme Court would ever look at the record.”

His fears were justified. On April 29, 2006, during the oral arguments over Northwest Austin, Roberts expressed impatience, and sounded as if he simply didn’t believe these challenges continued. “Well, that’s like the old elephant whistle. You know, I have this whistle to keep away the elephants,” he said, dismissively, as the defense pointed out the ongoing need for preclearance in the case. “There are no elephants, so it must work.”

“Obviously no one doubts the history here,” he added. “But at what point does that history stop justifying action with respect to some jurisdictions but not with respect to others…. When do they have to stop?” Neal (Katyal), then the principal deputy solicitor general, responded that since Congress had reauthorized the VRA for another 25 years, that date would be 2031. Roberts was unimpressed. “I mean, at some point it begins to look like the idea is that this is going to go on forever.”....>

<....The court’s five conservatives wanted to move on, and several appeared ready to address the larger constitutional issues that would trigger a challenge to the VRA, but didn’t have much beyond vibes to go on. So Roberts brokered a deal, and wrote an apparently unifying decision for a court that appeared deeply divided during oral arguments. Everybody won, sort of. The water district would be allowed to bail out of preclearance requirements. Other small entities were invited to apply for a reprieve. At the same time, Section 5—laying out the VRA’s preclearance regime—survived. The liberal justices bought time for Congress to potentially address the court’s impatience with the preclearance formula once more. “It wasn’t exactly a principled constitutional decision,” says Tatel, who had scoured the law to see if he could deliver a similar ruling that sanctioned a bailout for the water district, in part to keep the VRA away from the high court. But the law clearly didn’t allow it. (“It doesn’t work with the law. It’s not right,” he told me, “but that didn’t bother the court.”)

“They made a deal,” says Edward Blum, who helped bring the challenge to the VRA, and would also mastermind the clutch of cases that led the court to end affirmative action in college admissions.

Roberts seemed to have done the impossible, and he won praise from the media and court watchers for his measured and far-seeing “judicial statesmanship.” Liberals even claimed victory, crowing to The New Republic that they prevented the VRA from being struck down 5-4 by threatening some thunderous dissent that either led Justice Kennedy to get cold feet or the chief justice to back down.

If the liberals wanted to celebrate an imaginary win, Roberts had no problem with that. The chief justice was busy digging a trench and setting a trap. Indeed, the liberal justices scarcely seemed to notice the actual language of the opinion that they signed on to. “Things have changed in the South,” Roberts declared, writing for the full court. The VRA, he wrote, “imposes current burdens and must be justified by current needs.”

Roberts had conned the liberals into signing onto a broad indictment of the reasoning behind preclearance, aimed at a future case and a future decision. “The statute’s coverage formula is based on data that is now more than 35 years old,” Roberts argued, as though civil rights legislation had a sell-by date. “And there is considerable evidence that it fails to account for current political conditions.”

Then Roberts made one additional stealth play that helped assure that the next challenge to the VRA would arise quickly and would be aided by the plaintiffs’ success in Northwest Austin. He made an observation known as dicta—a comment that might not be necessary to resolve a case or even be legally binding in the future, but that can be cited as a “persuasive authority.” This is where Roberts gave birth to the fiction of a “fundamental principle of equal sovereignty” among states. The trouble with the principle is that it does not exist. Roberts created it with an ellipsis and what can only be understood as deliberate misapplication of the law.

Indeed, the Supreme Court had rejected this precise reading in a 1966 voting rights case that upheld the act’s constitutionality, in the very sentence that Roberts later claimed said the opposite. How did he get away with turning up into down? He cut the clauses he didn’t like and called it law.

Here is the actual decision from the case in question, Katzenbach v. South Carolina:

In acceptable legislative fashion, Congress chose to limit its attention to the geographic areas where immediate action seemed necessary…. The doctrine of the equality of States, invoked by South Carolina, does not bar this approach, for that doctrine applies only to the terms upon which States are admitted to the Union, and not to the remedies for local evils which have subsequently appeared.

And here is what Roberts wrote:

The Act also differentiates between the States, despite our historic tradition that all the States enjoy “equal sovereignty.” Distinctions can be justified in some cases. “The doctrine of the equality of States…does not bar…remedies for local evils which have subsequently appeared.” But a departure from the fundamental principle of equal sovereignty requires a showing that a statute’s disparate geographic coverage is sufficiently related to the problem that it targets.

<....Liberal justices either didn’t notice the dicta or did not think that Roberts would be so brazen as to write it into law citing his own invented precedent the next time a preclearance case came before the court. They underestimated both his chutzpah and his hubris. It was not the first—and would not be the last—time.

(I)f Roberts weakened the VRA’s foundations in Northwest Austin, in Shelby County, four years later, he came with the bulldozer. The preclearance formula had become outdated and no longer considered “current conditions,” Roberts wrote, brushing aside the lengthy congressional record filled with modern-day examples. Singling out states for disparate treatment, he held, failed to accord each state its “equal sovereignty.” The decision appeared modest and suggested that the court had little choice but to act. But the feigned modesty was pure misdirection.

The Shelby County decision is a deeply radical one. It usurps powers the Constitution specifically awards Congress. It uses the fictional principle of equal sovereignty, cooked up by Roberts in 2009, as its basis. And it cites statistics that are factually wrong and misstate the US Census.

In the wake of other draconian hard-right decisions, such as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health (2022), reversing the right to abortion, and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024), striking down “Chevron deference” and effectively undermining the authority of federal regulatory agencies, public confidence in the high court has plummeted. Large majorities of Americans see the justices as partisan proxies, viewing the law through whatever lens might create victories for their side. But even this disillusioned American majority may not suspect that the justices might just be making the law up as they go along—that their opinions carry footnotes and the force of law but stand on air. Nor do most Americans fully appreciate that five, and now six, of them can get away with this because they form a majority ideological bloc, accountable to no one.

That’s the real story behind John Roberts’s opinion in Shelby County. The chief justice obliterated the most successful civil rights legislation this nation has ever seen not just on flimsy criteria but on none at all.

“It’s made up,” the conservative judge and law professor Michael McConnell, a George W. Bush appointee, told NPR.

“This is a principle of constitutional law of which I had never heard,” the conservative judge and legal scholar Richard Posner observed, “for the excellent reason that…there is no such principle.”

“Yes, that’s right,” says Leah Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan. “There are passing references to the idea of equal sovereignty. But if you pause and think about them for more than a second, it’s clear that [Roberts] made the doctrine into something that it just wasn’t.”

Litman is the national authority on equal sovereignty. In 2016, she wrote a complete 67-page history of what Roberts called a “fundamental principle” and “historic tradition.” Her conclusion? Roberts manufactured it for his own purposes. It is, she writes, an “invented tradition”—invented by John Roberts, and then cited by John Roberts.

What Roberts didn’t make up, he got wrong. Roberts based his reasoning that things had changed in the South on voter registration statistics that, to him, showed that Blacks and whites had reached something close to parity—and that in some states, Blacks had even surpassed whites. His opinion even included a chart ostensibly documenting this.

In reality, though, Roberts had the statistics backward. They did not show what he said they did. In many cases, they showed the opposite.

Roberts used the numbers from the Senate Judiciary Report—the one that Republicans generated after the VRA’s passage to plant a record for its judicial demise. And intentionally or otherwise, the GOP report got it wrong. Roberts and the committee overstated white registration numbers. The Roberts chart counted Hispanics as whites—even those who were not US citizens and therefore ineligible to vote. That basic error threw off all the demographic comparisons.

In Georgia, for example, Roberts claimed that Black registration had risen to 64.2 percent and white registration had fallen behind at 63.5. But without the Hispanic numbers, white registration grew to 68 percent. It’s an improvement from 1965. But it’s not an example of Black registration outpacing whites, as Roberts claimed. In Virginia, meanwhile, Roberts argued that the gap between whites and Blacks had narrowed to just 10 percent—when in reality, it was more than 14 percent....>

<....Roberts simply didn’t understand how the Census reported race. The Census Bureau treats race and ethnicity differently. Hispanics are counted as an ethnicity, then usually included under white. The chief justice should have used the data for white-non-Hispanic. But that would not have given Roberts the result he wanted.

When reporters asked the court to explain how he could have gotten something so basic so wrong, the chief justice declined to answer questions. The court “does not comment on its opinions,” said a spokesperson, “which speak for themselves.”

(T)his was Congress’s decision to make,” Solicitor General Verrilli told me—a power awarded explicitly by the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution. Debo Adegbile, who defended the VRA before the court during both Shelby County and Northwest Austin, sees the long through line of the court’s resistance to the full sweep of those amendments. The court’s impatience with the past, its eagerness to declare the job complete and the nation whole, reminded him of the 1870s Cruikshank and Civil Rights Cases decisions that choked off Reconstruction and insisted that “there must be some stage in the progress of [a Black man’s] elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen, and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws”—even as freed slaves carried scars of their bondage.

“It’s just the continued resistance to the commitment to make the country whole and to be an inclusive democracy,” he told me. “And it’s being dressed up in sophisticated legal arguments. It’s not that we’re actually past anything. It’s that we are now at a point where we have the power to decide that we’re going to vary from the mission, create a situation where voters are exposed and…advantage the manipulations of state actors and local actors to impose barriers.”

Holder still stammers in disbelief. “Okay, Mr. Chief Justice, you say that America has changed. OK. And what’s your basis for saying that, as opposed to Congress holding hearings, thousands of pages of testimony, hundreds of exhibits that say America has changed some, but not enough? You’re saying, ‘No, Congress, essentially you’re wrong.… OK. Then where were your researchers?”

The former attorney general winces in horror when the case is referred to by its full name: Shelby County v. Holder. He cites two days as the worst of his tenure: The day he accompanied President Barack Obama to console parents of children slain during the Sandy Hook massacre, and “the other one was to hear from the Supreme Court that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was, in substantial ways, murdered.”

“Nothing had changed in the South,” he told me. “The only thing that changed was the personnel on the US Supreme Court.”

Verrilli also replays this crushing defeat in his head, wondering if there was anything he could have done to guard the Voting Rights Act against implacable foes. “I wish I could tell you, David, that I have stopped doing that, but I have not. It haunts me to this day.” He slows and wipes his eyes. It’s clear he is fighting back tears, unsuccessfully. “I think all the time about what I might have done differently, because it was a devastating defeat and it had huge consequences. I take solace in the thought that I don’t think there’s anything I could have done differently. But that only makes it marginally less powerful.”>

<How top congressional Republicans navigate an intraparty feud over a proof-of-citizenship voting bill and a looming government shutdown could make or break their future in leadership.

GOP lawmakers and congressional sources told the Washington Examiner that Republican members will be watching closely who among their leaders fights to attach a bill requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration to a stopgap spending measure to avert an Oct. 1 shutdown.

Senate GOP leaders are resisting an effort by hard-line House Republicans to tack on the legislation known as the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act. But that doesn’t mean Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is in the clear.

“Here's my issue: I don't want to vote for something that I don't have a speaker of the House that will fight for it,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) told the Washington Examiner. “And I know for a fact we do not have a speaker of the House that will fight for it.”

On the other side of the Capitol, Republican sources say the trio gunning to be the next Senate GOP leader are under the microscope: Minority Whip John Thune (R-SD), Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), and Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL). All three are SAVE Act co-sponsors and running to be Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) successor.

“This is not only part of government funding and election integrity but also a piece of the race for McConnell's replacement,” a senior Senate GOP source said. “Calling on those individuals to take a stand here is going to be important.”

Sources in both chambers say McConnell is privately pushing against including the SAVE Act out of fear the partisan legislation could tank a spending deal with the Democratic-led Senate and threaten a shutdown at a pivotal time before the November elections.

Introducing the SAVE Act in the House could also give Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) an opportunity to throw in a voting rights bill, such as the John Lewis Act.

But Johnson is facing pressure from the conservative Freedom Caucus, which took the official position on Aug. 12 to include the SAVE Act in any continuing resolution legislation and is demanding Johnson use "leverage" in the spending fights to pass the Trump-backed legislation.

The support for the SAVE Act from both hard liners and establishment GOP lawmakers in this latest spending deal is a contrast to previous feuds over such measures known as continuing resolutions. Infighting between House leadership and hard-line members from the House Freedom Caucus over CRs have previously kneecapped negotiations.

Now, it appears September will be an inter-chamber battle between Senate and House Republicans over whether the voter integrity bill should be included.

Some Republicans accuse McConnell of undermining their talks and presenting misleading fears over including the SAVE Act because he would prefer to pass a yearlong budget package. Many congressional Republicans want a short-term measure to allow a potential Trump presidency greater power over government spending.

“McConnell wants an end-of-year omnibus,” a senior Republican aide told the Washington Examiner. “It's a big swamp spending spree for all the usual swamp suspects. Most people see right through this and think he's pulling the John Lewis thing out of thin air.”

McConnell’s office declined to comment and said it did not respond in the press to internal GOP staff discussions.

The SAVE Act, which is sponsored by Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) and endorsed by Johnson and former President Donald Trump, was passed with support from all Republicans and five Democrats back in July.

Several hard-line conservatives hardly ever vote for continuing resolutions. They argue that spending bills should be passed one by one and excessive spending should be cut, not extended. As they have in previous spending battles this Congress, House GOP leadership has needed to rely on Democratic support to pass a CR through to the Senate....>

<....Roy said he is one of such conservatives who “loath to [sic] pass a continuing resolution” in the first place.

‘“As we head into the September season and funding government, we don't think we should be funding the government if we're not ensuring that the elections that are going to determine the fate and future of the country aren't being decided by just citizens,” Roy said in an interview.

The Texas Republican blasted “swamp Republicans” such as McConnell for supporting a CR, arguing they want the spending deal to secure money for Ukraine and receive earmarks to get “goodies as retiring members of Congress.”

“So, those of us — you want to talk about, like, who's fighting, you’ve got conservative Republicans who were trying to do what we said we would do, which is constrain spending, constrain the swamp, ensure only citizens vote, try to deal with the border the best we can and manage a funding bill to get it out of a swamp driven lame duck,” Roy said.

However, a House leadership aide told the Washington Examiner that the length for a CR, as well as bills attached, such as the SAVE Act, could impact whether some Republicans typically against the spending measure are swayed to vote for it.

“We don't want to kick the can down the road, but we are in a position right now where, heading into September, we are almost assuredly going to get a continual resolution because we don't have the appropriations bills completed,” Roy said. “So if that's going to be the case, then I believe that we should be fighting for an important issue that unites our conference, but more importantly, is an 80 plus percent issue among American citizens.”

Greene said she would consider voting for the CR should the SAVE Act be included.

“If we don't have fair elections, if we don't have elections we can trust, we don't have a government. And that's really the reality. So yeah, we're willing to fight for it. I'm willing to fight for it,” Greene said.>

<The Affordable Care Act is back under attack. Not as in the repeal-and-replace debates of yore, but in a fresher take from Republican lawmakers who say key parts of the ACA cost taxpayers too much and provide incentive for fraud.

Several House Republican leaders have called on two watchdog agencies to investigate, while Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) fired off more than half a dozen questions in a recent letter to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

At issue are the ACA’s enhanced subsidies, put in place during the covid-19 pandemic as part of economic recovery legislation. Grassley said in a recent news release that the subsidies “left Obamacare, a program already riddled with problems, wide open to new waste, fraud and abuse.”

While potential fraud in government programs has always been a rallying cry for conservatives, the recent criticisms are a renewed line of attack on the ACA because repealing it is unlikely, given that more than 21 million people enrolled in marketplace plans for this year.

“I see what’s happening right now as laying the groundwork for the big fight next year,” said Debbie Curtis, a vice president at consulting firm McDermott+.

The enhanced subsidies are set to expire in late 2025. Without them, millions of Americans would likely see their premiums go up.

But the debate will also likely draw in other issues, including Trump-era tax cuts, which also must be addressed next year. Also potentially in play are other aspects of the ACA, including a special year-round enrollment period and zero-premium plans for low-income consumers.

Much of what eventually happens will depend on the makeup of the Senate and House, as well as control of the White House, after the November elections.

“The fate of the enhanced tax credits is dependent on the Democrats holding some majority in Congress and/or winning the presidency and is also tied inextricably to the Trump tax cut expiration,” said Dean Rosen, a partner at Mehlman Consulting and a former senior Republican congressional staffer. That’s because both sides have incentive to extend all or part of the tax cuts, but each will want some kind of compromise on other issues as well.

The growing outcry by Republicans about the subsidies goes hand in hand with a controversial recent report from a conservative think tank that estimates millions of people — or their brokers — may be misstating their incomes and getting the most generous ACA subsidies.

The Paragon Health Institute report estimates that the number of people who enrolled in ACA coverage for this year who projected they would earn between 100% of the federal poverty level and 150% — amounts that qualify them for zero-premium plans and smaller deductibles — likely exceeds the number of people with that level of income, particularly in nine states.

It recommends several changes to the ACA, including letting the enhanced subsidies expire, increasing repayment amounts for people who fail to project their incomes correctly, and ending the Biden-backed initiative that allows very low-income people to enroll in ACA coverage year-round rather than having to wait for the once-a-year general open enrollment period.

The Paragon report was cited by both Grassley and the House GOP lawmakers in their letters to government overseers. It also notes what they consider a related concern: ongoing problems of unscrupulous, commission-seeking agents enrolling people in ACA coverage or switching their plans without their permission, often into highly subsidized plans. KFF Health News uncovered the enrollment and switching schemes in the spring.

Some critics, though, question how the Paragon analysis was done.

For instance, Paragon’s findings rely on two unrelated data sets from different years. Combining them makes many people who are eligible for subsidies appear to be ineligible, said Gideon Lukens, a senior fellow and director of research at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “The analytic approach is not careful or sophisticated enough to provide accurate or even meaningful results.”

Paragon President Brian Blase, a former senior Trump administration official and a co-author of the report, said it used publicly available data that others could use to confirm its results.

Paragon’s recommendations also drew mixed reactions.

Sabrina Corlette, a co-director of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University, said they “would make coverage less affordable, disproportionately affecting low-income people, and that’s the opposite of the goals of the ACA.”....>

<....Another ACA expert, Joseph Antos of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, agrees with one of the recommended fixes: changing the structure of the subsidies to limit zero-premium plans.

“Giving health insurance away is the problem,” said Antos, who said it is probably contributing to the unauthorized switching by some rogue brokers, who know if they sign someone up for a free plan without their permission, they’re unlikely to get caught for a while because the person won’t get monthly bills.

Another potential solution to people misstating their income is that “the seven or eight states that still haven’t expanded Medicaid should do that,” Antos said. The expansion would open Medicaid eligibility to more people who earn less than the poverty level, reducing the incentive to overestimate their income to qualify for ACA subsidies.

Among other things, the subsidies are larger now for low-income enrollees. For example, families at the poverty level or just above it ($30,000 to $45,000 for a family of four) can currently qualify for coverage with no monthly premium, whereas before they would have had to pay 2% to 4% of their annual income toward such a plan.

President Joe Biden has pushed to make the subsidies permanent and has often touted the record enrollment in ACA plans under his watch. Across all income groups, nearly 20 million people out of 21 million ACA enrollees this year got at least some subsidy, according to a KFF report.

Subsidies, also called premium tax credits, are generally paid directly to health insurers, and applicants must estimate their income for the coming year to qualify.

Those who incorrectly project their incomes — possibly because they work irregular retail hours, are self-employed and give a best guess of business, or get an unexpected raise or a new job — must pay back all or part of the subsidy, on a sliding scale linked to income.

The cost of the enhanced subsidies has been sharply criticized by some GOP leaders after the Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that making them permanent would add $335 billion to the federal budget deficit over 10 years.

Democrats have pointed to another recent CBO report estimating extending the Trump-era tax cuts would add $4.6 trillion to the deficit over 10 years.

The enhanced subsidies “cost a lot less than that and it’s actually helping people,” Curtis said.

Ultimately, “every health care debate comes down to money,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News. “There is a trade-off here. Millions of people have gotten coverage and more affordable premiums due to these enhanced subsidies, but extending them would cost the government a lot of money.”

Despite the attention paid by some GOP lawmakers to the fraud concerns, many political observers say they don’t think they will play a direct role during the election campaigns of either party.

“For Republicans, they’ll stay away from health care period. It is not a winning campaign issue for them,” Curtis said. “With Harris’ campaign, we will see a continued drive for affordable coverage being key, particularly drug costs. In neither party will you hear much about the importance of extending the enhanced subsidies. It’s too complicated.”>

<For more than a year, Gavin Newsom was everywhere as a star surrogate for President Joe Biden. Since Kamala Harris took over as the nominee, you almost have to squint to see California’s governor.

Newsom has spent little time campaigning in other states since his fellow Californian leaped to the top of the Democratic ticket, an abrupt shift after barnstorming the country for Biden, especially during the turbulent final weeks of his candidacy.

The governor also had a small footprint at last week’s Democratic National Convention, opting to make the rounds on cable TV and some podcasts rather than join most of his colleagues at state breakfasts, fireside chats with reporters and on the main stage.

More than a month after the shakeup, it’s still unclear what role Harris has for Newsom, a longtime ally and sometimes rival who is a product of the same elite San Francisco political circles.

Newsom’s reduced role in the campaign has fueled parlor intrigue in Sacramento for weeks, as political insiders question the governor’s status as a national surrogate and how his own potential future presidential ambitions could be affected by Harris’ rise.

Nathan Click, a spokesperson for Newsom’s political operation, said the governor is “all in” for Harris and dismissed any notion that his own presidential prospects could be a factor in his level of involvement.

“He is totally focused the next 70 odd days on electing VP Harris, defeating Trump once and for all, and going to the mat for her campaign,” Click said in an email, “just as he did at the convention, on Fox and elsewhere at the request of her campaign.”

Click added that Newsom plans to headline a fundraiser for Harris in San Mateo County just south of San Francisco Wednesday, an event his office and the Harris campaign hadn’t previously announced. Newsom’s camp said they’re also coordinating with Harris’ team on September campaign events.

The governor's scaled-back role is also likely a reflection of the stark differences between Biden and Harris.

Biden needed a burst of youthful enthusiasm to shore up support among the party’s liberal base, and Newsom was willing to be that voice when few other governors would. There was even some give and take, such as when the Biden campaign last fall indulged Newsom’s Fox News debate with Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Harris, on the other hand, can carry her own message nationally, has an abundance of intraparty momentum and needs swing-state supporters who can chip away at former President Donald Trump’s foothold in purple battlegrounds.

“He was a uniquely good surrogate for Biden. Kamala doesn’t need the energy delivery as much right now,” said Paul Mitchell, a Democratic consultant and Sacramento-based political data expert....>

<....While Newsom stepped back after the president dropped out, others jumped to the forefront when Harris became the nominee.

Harris has included more House members and senators, as well as battleground state leaders, like Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan — who, as POLITICO previously reported, needed some prodding to get more involved with Biden. Other top Harris surrogates include Governors Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Andy Beshear of Kentucky, who, unlike Newsom, were both part of the veepstakes.

Newsom himself even suggested, in brief remarks last week with the Los Angeles Times, that Harris might not really need a fellow Californian. “At the end of the day it will be swing states that will be determinative, and if I can fill a void that others can’t, then I’ll be there,” he said.

The chatter around Newsom was amplified by his subdued showing at the convention. The governor made brief remarks from the floor as he led the state in delivering the final delegates to make Harris the party’s nominee, but he was one of the few major statewide California officials not to speak from the DNC main stage.

His camp said he had been offered a speaking slot in the 7 p.m. hour on the first night (outside primetime), but wasn’t able to arrive in Chicago in time because of a back-to-school commitment that morning.

Newsom also sparked a minor brouhaha last Friday when he seemed to joke about the unusual nature of Harris' ascension during an interview with Pod Save America: “We went through a very open process, a very inclusive process. It was bottom-up, I don’t know if you know that. That’s what I’ve been told to say.”

The governor quickly pivoted, however, telling the podcast’s hosts he’s amazed by “how unified” the party has become as he praised Harris.

Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, an earlier mentor to both Newsom and Harris, had prodded Newsom to energetically support Harris. On Tuesday, Brown told Playbook, “I still have that attitude.”

As for whether the governor will hit the road for her, Brown said it’s still too early to draw conclusions about any role that Newsom might play in the final stretch. Plus, he added, that’s ultimately up to the nominee to decide.>

<As the week got underway, Donald Trump probably thought going to Arlington National Cemetery would be a good idea. The former president, despite his awful record related to respecting U.S. troops and veterans, appeared eager on Monday to exploit the third anniversary of a terrorist attack in Afghanistan that killed 13 U.S. service members and more than 150 Afghans.

As a result, the Republican nominee attended a wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which was quickly followed by a thumbs-up photo-op at a gravestone in Section 60 of the cemetery, where many service members killed in Afghanistan and Iraq are buried.

At that point, the story was already problematic. On Tuesday, however, the matter took a turn for the worse amid reports of an “incident” involving Trump aides and someone who worked at the cemetery. A day later, the controversy continued to intensify. NBC News reported:

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign is playing down reports of an altercation during his visit to Arlington National Cemetery on Monday, a move that signals its concern about potential political fallout from the incident.

Republicans might’ve hoped this scandal would be a one-day story. I have some bad news for them.

It’s a story with a surprising number of moving parts, so let’s summarize where things stand.

* There’s no real doubt that there was some kind of incident on Monday — both the Trump campaign and Arlington officials have acknowledged as much — but a New York Times report said a woman who works at the cemetery, and who filed an incident report with the military authorities, declined to press charges. According to the report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, the official feared “retaliation” from Trump’s followers.

* The same Times report highlighted concerns from one family, whose loved one served eight combat tours and is buried at Arlington, that believes the Trump campaign filmed his gravesite without permission.

* The Associated Press reported that the Trump campaign received warnings about not taking photographs in Section 60. If that report is accurate, the Republican operation did not heed those warnings.

* Mark Esper, who served as Trump’s Defense secretary, called for an investigation into the incident. Similarly, Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia issued a written statement calling for the release of documents related to Monday’s incident.

* USA Today published a report on veterans who were not pleased with Trump’s actions. The article quoted retired Major General Paul Eaton, a senior adviser at VoteVets, who called the campaign’s actions at the cemetery “nauseating” and “repugnant.”

* As feared, Team Trump has already released a campaign video featuring footage of the GOP candidate’s visit to Arlington.

* Did the Trump campaign’s actions this week violate the law? A Washington Post report reviewed the relevant details.

* Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance said Vice President Kamala Harris “can go to hell” for criticizing Trump’s cemetery appearance, despite the fact that Harris hadn’t actually made any such criticisms. The Ohio senator later declined to say whether presidential candidates should have to abide by federal law prohibiting campaigns from filming at gravesites.>

<Republicans have pulled off a coup against an entire branch of government, and nobody seems to have noticed. But if you pay attention, it’s shocking.

Sometimes you can learn as much from attending to what Republicans suddenly stop saying as from what they are talking about. In this case, it’s their half-century-long obsession with convening a constitutional convention to rewrite the US Constitution. Under Article V of our Constitution, when two-thirds of the states formally call for a “con-con” to rewrite our nation’s founding document, it officially comes into being.

They can then make small changes like enshrining the right of billionaires and corporations to bribe judges and politicians, or insert the doctrine of corporate personhood into the document, or simply throw the whole thing out and start over. Many on the right are hoping to insert a national ban on abortion into a new constitution; others want to end the right of women to vote, do away with all antidiscrimination laws, outlaw labor unions, or return the selection of senators to the states.

So far, 19 Republican-controlled states have signed on to a call for a convention under Article V. The project, heavily funded by rightwing billionaires, even has its own website: conventionofstates.com. Consider just a sampling of recent GOP supporters of the project:

— Senator Marco Rubio: “One of the things I’m going to do on my first day in office is I will put the prestige and power of the presidency behind a constitutional convention of the states.”

— Governor Greg Abbott: “We need a Convention of States to restore the rule of law in America.”

— Governor Ron DeSantis: “An Article V Convention of States is the best way to bring power back to the states and the people.”

— Congressman Jodey Arrington: “We need to go back to our founding document, back to our Constitution, and put the restraints on Congress that our founders intended.”

— Senator Ted Cruz: “An Article V Convention of States is a powerful tool given to us by the Founders to rein in the federal government.”

— Senator Rand Paul: “I’m a big fan of the Convention of States project. I think it’s the solution to Washington’s overreach.”

But over the past year, Republicans have suddenly fallen silent on the issue. Project 2025, for example, the all-encompassing wish-list for the GOP and its billionaire owners, lacks even one single mention of a constitutional convention.

Why would this be?

The simple and obvious answer is that Republicans are rewriting the Constitution right now, this year and last, through their proxies among the six corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court.

Having succeeded in seizing the Court, the GOP has been able to relax about their plan to call a convention. So far, just in the past two years, Republicans on the Court have taken an ax to the Constitution. They have:

— Turned presidents who are inclined to break the law into kings or monarchs who are no longer accountable to police, courts, or juries, essentially rewriting Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution.

— Ended the constitutional rights of women to their own bodies, ignoring or rewriting the 1st, 4th, 9th, and 14th Amendments to the Constitution.

— Gutted the power of federal agencies to protect consumers and our environment, essentially rewriting Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution.

— Fully legalized the bribery of politicians so long as the bribes are paid after the deed is done (making it a “tip”) rather than before (which the Court said would still be a bribe) overriding multiple constitutional prohibitions on bribery.

— Overturned parts of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act to legalize racially discriminatory gerrymandering where it benefits Republicans.

— Rewritten the Second Amendment and legalized bump stocks to put functionally fully-automatic weapons of war on our streets.

And, it appears, they’re just getting warmed up. Next year could see an end to gay marriage, contraception for single people, the abortion pill, the right to possess pornography (which they get to define) or read “banned” books, any meaningful regulation of billionaire-owned social media, further gutting of union rights, and the insertion of religion into schools nationwide…among other things.

Given how radical and willing they are to overturn established law, constitutional doctrine, and to create new law or constitutional doctrine out of thin air, it’s easy to see why Republicans would shift their efforts away from trying to rewrite the Constitution and toward supporting their shills on the Court....>

<....This has not gone unnoticed by President Biden and his Democratic colleagues. Last month, when the six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled that presidents can commit crimes without consequences if they call them “official acts,” President Biden spoke out with an uncharacteristic ferocity:

“This decision today has continued the Court’s attack in recent years on a wide range of long-established legal principles in our nation, from gutting voting rights and civil rights to taking away a woman’s right to choose to today’s decision that undermines the rule of law of this nation.”

Two weeks later, The Washington Post reported:

“President Biden is finalizing plans to endorse major changes to the Supreme Court in the coming weeks, including proposals for legislation to establish term limits for the justices and an enforceable ethics code, according to two people briefed on the plans.”

With Vice President Harris having replaced President Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, and the House still under the control of extremist Republicans under Mike Johnson, it appears that President Biden’s Supreme Court agenda has receded into the background.

But Vice President Harris and Governor Walz should be (and almost certainly are) putting considerable attention and work into how to restrain the Supreme Court from doing further violence to our constitutional system of government once they’re in office.

It must be, in fact, their first order of business, for two major reasons.

The first is that several of the rulings by Republicans on the Court have had the effect of amplifying and solidifying Republican control over the nation. By single-handedly overturning the voting rights act and legalizing bribery by billionaires, they’ve created a political imbalance that fails to represent the people of our country and instead just does what their favorite billionaires and giant corporations want.

As Michael Moore reports, multiple polls have found in recent years:

— 90% of Americans want stronger gun control laws

— 89% want an end to partisan and racial gerrymandering

— 84% want free pre-kindergarten

— 79% want the morbidly rich and corporations to pay their damn taxes

— 76% want a higher minimum wage

— 73% want an end to student debt and free college

— 72% want action on the climate crisis and money out of politics

— 71% want an end to union-busting

— 70% want marijuana legalized nationwide

— 69% want to maintain gay marriage and abortion rights

— 65% want to end the electoral college and put term limits on SCOTUS justices

None of these things are happening because of the Republican lock on the Supreme Court, the third and unelected branch of government which is today only beholden to whichever billionaire offers individual members the best gifts, goodies, and expensive vacations.

Had the actual winners of the national vote become president in 2000 and 2016, the only Republican on the Court today would be Clarence Thomas, and America would be a very different nation.

Instead, we’ve had two illegitimate Republican presidents who essentially packed the Court. Sandra Day O’Connor was clear about why she cast the tie-breaking vote to hand the presidency to Bush in 2000: she told friends she didn’t want her replacement to be chosen by Al Gore. And, of course, Trump would never have become president without help from Vladimir Putin.

These Republicans on the Supreme Court, five of the six appointed by presidents who lost the national vote, are the main reason why Americans can’t have nice things — from a national healthcare system to free college to a functioning democracy that does what the majority of its citizens want — like every other democracy in the world.

The second reason Harris and Walz should be preparing to act immediately after they’re sworn into office on January 20th of next year (G-d willing!) is that a president’s power is at its peak the moment she takes office. After that, it’s largely downhill, as opposition politicians and the press pile on and even members of their own party begin to highlight cracks in the new administration’s policy chops.

This is why FDR, LBJ, Reagan, Obama, and Biden all got so much done in their first 100 days. If they hadn’t started out with their top and most controversial priorities, they never would have been able to get to them.

And, because the cancer at the heart of our democracy is currently centered in the Supreme Court, it’s why President Harris and Governor Walt [sic] must focus their energy and political capital on taking on this out-of-control Supreme Court’s power as soon as they take office.>

<Last week's Democratic convention was the crescendo of an unprecedented period in American history: The Republican presidential nominee survived an assassination attempt, the Democratic president ended his reelection bid, and the vice president became her party's nominee without a single primary vote. But the summer was equally extraordinary for how it capped off the plot that we expose in The Lever's new investigative series Master Plan - a scheme to normalize and legalize corruption, transforming graft from a crime into the widely accepted way politics is now conducted.

In just a few months, the U.S. Supreme Court's billionaire–coddled justices made it legal for politicians to accept gifts from beneficiaries of government favors; Donald Trump promised to enrich fossil fuel industry donors in exchange for $1 billion in campaign donations, while his running mate J.D. Vance begged a tech billionaire to bankroll their campaign; moguls funneling cash to Democrats demanded the firing of the antitrust regulator scrutinizing their businesses; both parties held corporate–sponsored conventions that prominently featured billionaires and CEOs as keynote speakers; and spending by Super PACs and other shadowy groups crossed the $1 billion mark.

In an election purporting to be about the survival of the American Way Of Life, this miasma of transactional cash is the real threat to democracy - one harming us all.

Money is why popular, desperately needed legislation rarely ever passes - it is why both parties colluded to kill off a minimum wage increase; why Americans have no guaranteed right to medical care; why oil companies are permitted to incinerate the climate; and why corporations are allowed to fleece us in myriad ways with no consequences.

Money is why Trump has abandoned much of the anti-corporate rhetoric that once distinguished him as a heterodox conservative, and almost certainly why he has reversed himself on key policies of interest to a new crop of donors.

Money is why Vice President Kamala Harris seems more comfortable avoiding press attention and running on vague platitudes rather than endorsing initiatives that might provoke the ire of well-funded Super PACs.

Money is why Democratic leaders started telling reporters that even if Harris wins the election promising voters a crusade against corporate profiteering, her anti-price-gouging initiatives are dead on arrival in the next Congress. And money is why a new study shows most Democratic candidates up and down the ballot avoid explicitly criticizing corporations and billionaires - the forces who are creating the problems that Democrats diagnose, but who will spend those Democrats into the ground if they make too much noise.

Whatever your preferred label for this dystopia - oligarchy, plutocracy, kleptocracy - you might assume it is just a naturally occurring inevitability, but nothing could be further from the truth.

This era of corruption - in which elections are glorified auctions - was manufactured by a cadre of oligarchs and operatives whose agenda could only be implemented by deregulating the campaign finance system so that cash could short circuit democracy.

"Political Power Is Necessary"

This untold story began a half century ago amid a golden age of democratic reforms. As America's government was responding to public discontent by creating Medicare, Medicaid, environmental regulation, and a war on poverty, a genteel tobacco industry lawyer authored a 1971 manifesto sounding an alarm.

In his now-famous memo, the soon-to-be Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell cast corporations and oligarchs as persecuted victims, and urged them to use their outsized resources to assume "a broader and more vigorous role in the political arena" to halt a government becoming too responsive to popular demands.

"In terms of political influence with respect to the course of legislation and government action, the American business executive is truly the ‘forgotten man,'" Powell wrote. "This is the lesson that political power is necessary; that such power must be assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination - without embarrassment."

Some have cast Powell's blueprint as little more than a 1970s version of a meaningless Reddit rant rather than the foundational text that some liberals believe it to be. But if anything, the significance of Powell's screed has been understated....>

<....Documents unearthed by The Lever show that in response to the memo, leaders of the country's most powerful corporations organized task forces to implement its directives. One of their goals was deregulating the campaign finance system. Why? Because they understood that in a properly functioning one-person-one-vote democracy, they would never be able to gain control of the political system and enact their self-enriching, wealth-concentrating agenda. They knew that to get their way, they must be allowed to buy elections, legislation, court rulings, and public policy.

And so in short order, corporations and moguls inspired by Powell began funding think tanks, political advocacy organizations, and conservative law firms - and victories followed.

First, with the support of conservative philanthropist John Olin's political machine, Congress quietly added loopholes to the post-Watergate anti-corruption laws allowing for the explosion of corporate political action committees that could buy legislators.

Then in a lawsuit masterminded by American Enterprise Institute legal activists Ralph Winter and John Bolton (yes, that John Bolton!) - and stealthily boosted by then-Solicitor General Robert Bork - conservatives convinced the Supreme Court to endorse a radical legal doctrine equating money with constitutionally protected speech.

Soon after, Powell successfully lobbied his fellow justices to extend those free speech rights to corporations aiming to spend big money to buy elections.

These early wins unleashed a tidal wave of corporate money flooding into politics, which birthed an era of neoliberal tax, deregulatory, and anti-union policies, just as the master planners wanted. It also delivered an attendant epoch of corruption scandals, from Abscam, to the Keating Five, to Enron, to Jack Abramoff and the K Street Project.

The throughline in each sordid episode was money being used to subvert democracy - in specific, to pressure elected officials to use their power to enrich donors at the expense of voters.

Not surprisingly, the influence-peddling imbroglios coincided with other spectacles of institutionalized corruption - the insurance industry's political spending killed universal health care initiatives and replaced them with a system of government subsidies; the fossil fuel industry's political spending killed climate legislation and got the greenlight for record production; and Wall Street's political spending killed New Deal regulations that might have prevented the financial crisis.

With money politics ascending, wealth concentrated, government shrunk, the working class was pulverized, and corporations gained control. At the twilight of the 20th century, Powell's mission seemed on a glidepath.

Reform And Then Collapse

But amid this grotesquerie, some finally fought back - most prominently and unexpectedly, a scandal-plagued John McCain.

After being humiliated as one of the Keating Five who pressured federal banking regulators on behalf of a donor, the Arizona senator adopted the zeal of a convert to the anti-corruption cause. He waged a yearslong battle for legislation to restrict unlimited corporate spending on politics, eventually using an insurgent presidential bid to shame George W. Bush - the personification of Big Money politics - into signing the first campaign finance reform law in a generation.

But while the Supreme Court briefly upheld that legislation in 2003, it was a short-lived respite.

The Powell Memo had urged corporations and business leaders to fund political infrastructure focused on changing the judiciary. When the seats of Justices William Rehnqist and Sandra Day O'Connor opened up in 2005, that well-financed machine made sure the Bush administration replaced them not with moderates, but with archconservatives committed to the master plan.

Led by the Federalist Society's Leonard Leo, the conservative legal movement ran a multimillion-dollar campaign to install archconservative John Roberts. The same master planners then ran a campaign to convince Senate Republicans to block potential moderate nominee Harriet Miers, prompting Bush to replace her with the far-right Samuel Alito.

In the wake of the duo's confirmations, liberals consoled themselves with hopes that the seemingly reasonable Justice Anthony Kennedy would maintain a pragmatic equilibrium on the high court.

Kennedy, though, was much like his predecessor, Powell. He cut a moderate profile, but had long been an opponent of tough campaign finance and anti-corruption laws - hardly surprising considering his early career was spent as a corporate lobbyist doling out cash to lawmakers, and as an author of Ronald Reagan's first anti-tax ballot measure in the Powell Memo years....>