<Former President Donald Trump, the GOP's presidential nominee, made a bold campaign promise to the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina during a rally on Saturday, vowing to grant them federal recognition if he's reelected in November.

Speaking at the Aero Center near Wilmington International Airport in North Carolina, the former president addressed a crowd of supporters, including John Cummings, a Lumbee Tribe member and Robeson County board commissioner.

"The Lumbee Tribe has been wrongfully denied federal recognition for more than a century," Trump declared. "But now we're going to take care of it. We'll take care of it right at the beginning."

The Lumbee Tribe, with a rich history dating back hundreds of years, has long sought federal recognition, according to its official site. In 1956, Congress acknowledged the Lumbee as a Native American tribe but denied them the federal benefits typically associated with such recognition. The tribe's ancestral homeland lies in southeastern North Carolina, along the Lumbee River.

Federal recognition would potentially open doors to various benefits and protections for the tribe, including access to federal funding for education, health care, and economic development.

Trump criticized the Biden administration's handling of Native American issues, saying, "They have not been treated properly by this administration as we know." The former president also accused former President Barack Obama of not providing solutions for issues faced by the Lumbee Tribe.

"[President Joe] Biden and Obama promised to remedy that," Trump said. "They wanted to remedy the injustice, but they never did it. They broke their promise."

Newsweek contacted a Biden spokesperson via email and the Lumbee Tribe via online form on Saturday for comment.

However, Trump's promise comes against a backdrop of criticism from Native American advocates and Democratic lawmakers regarding his administration's past actions towards tribal communities.

Former Senator Tom Udall, a New Mexico Democrat who was vice chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, previously accused the Trump administration in 2020 of "actively undermining Tribal sovereignty" and "mishandling a once-in-a-century pandemic that is disproportionately hurting Native communities," in a released memo, fact-checking "the Trump administration attempt to re-write its Native American Record, False Promises to Tribes."

The memo pointed to the Trump administration's past attempts to exclude tribal businesses from COVID-19 relief funds, proposals to cut funding for Native education programs, and efforts to open sacred lands to resource exploitation. The Trump administration has also faced backlash for its stance on the Affordable Care Act, which tribal leaders have described as a critical lifeline for Native communities to access health care.

Further scrutiny of the Trump administration's record on Native American issues reveals additional controversies. In March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic was unfolding, the Bureau of Indian Affairs informed the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe that its reservation would be disestablished and its lands taken out of trust, a move reminiscent of the widely criticized Termination Era policies in the '50s and '60s. The Trump administration was also accused of making it more difficult for tribes to rebuild their homelands through new guidance on taking land into trust.

Environmental concerns have also been at the forefront of criticisms. Despite protests from the Tohono O'odham Nation, the Trump administration proceeded with the construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall, reportedly destroying sacred and burial sites on tribal ancestral homelands. Similarly, attempts to open land surrounding Chaco Canyon, a World Heritage Site and ancestral home to Southwest tribes, to oil and natural gas exploration have met with strong opposition from Native communities and their allies in Congress.

The Trump administration's handling of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) crisis has also been a point of contention. While Trump signed executive orders addressing the issue in his third year in office, critics say these actions came years after bipartisan efforts in the Senate had already been working to address the crisis.

Newsweek has also contacted Trump's spokesperson Steven Cheung via email on Saturday for comment.

Despite these sharp criticisms, Trump's promise of federal recognition resonates with many Lumbee tribal members who attended his rally and have long awaited this status from the government.>

<A local Ohio elections board says the county sheriff's department will not be used for election security following a social media post by the sheriff saying people with Kamala Harris yard signs should have their addresses recorded so that immigrants can be sent to live with them if the Democratic vice president wins the November election.

In a statement on the Portage County Democrats' Facebook page, county board of elections chair Randi Clites said members voted 3-1 Friday to remove the sheriff's department from providing security during in-person absentee voting.

Clites cited public comments indicating “perceived intimidation by our sheriff against certain voters” and the need to “make sure every voter in Portage County feels safe casting their ballot for any candidate they choose.”

A Ravenna Record-Courier story on the Akron Beacon Journal site reported that a day earlier, about 150 people crowded into a room at the Kent United Church of Christ for a meeting sponsored by the NAACP of Portage County, many expressing fear about the Sept. 13 comments.

“I believe walking into a voting location where a sheriff deputy can be seen may discourage voters from entering,” Clites said. The board is looking at using private security already in place at the administration building or having Ravenna police provide security, Clites said.

Portage County Sheriff Bruce Zuchowski posted a screenshot of a Fox News segment criticizing President Joe Biden and Harris over immigration. Likening people in the U.S. illegally to “human locusts,” he suggested recording addresses of people with Harris yard signs so when migrants need places to live “we’ll already have the addresses of their New families ... who supported their arrival!”

Local Democrats filed complaints with the Ohio secretary of state and other agencies, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio accused Zuchowski of an unconstitutional “impermissible threat” against residents who want to display political yard signs. Republican Gov. Mike DeWine called the comments “unfortunate” and “not helpful.” The secretary of state's office said the comments didn't violate election laws and it didn't plan any action.

Zuchowski, a Republican supporter of former President Donald Trump, said in a follow-up post last week that his comments “may have been a little misinterpreted??" He said, however, that while voters can choose whomever they want for president, they “have to accept responsibility for their actions.”

A message seeking comment was sent Sunday to Zuchowski, who spent 26 years with the Ohio State Highway Patrol and was a part-time deputy sheriff before winning the top job in 2020. He is running for reelection as the chief law enforcement officer of the northeast Ohio county about an hour outside of Cleveland.>

<Kamala Harris laid down another challenge to Republican rival Donald Trump to meet her for a second debate before November’s presidential election, telling supporters in New York that her opponent “seems to be looking for an excuse” to avoid a second confrontation.

On Saturday, the vice-president and Democratic nominee said she had accepted an invitation from CNN to debate the former president, but Trump said it was already “too late”.

In her remarks at a New York fundraiser, Harris doubled down in her taunting of Trump over the issue, saying: “I think we should have another debate.”

“I accepted an invitation to debate in October, which my opponent seems to be looking for an excuse to avoid when he should accept,” she added. “He should accept because I feel very strongly that we owe it to the American people, to the voters, to meet once more before election day.”

The question of the US’s high stakes presidential debates has hung over the candidates since Joe Biden dropped out of the race following a disastrous performance in June. The single scheduled debate between Trump and Harris, earlier this month, was widely viewed to have gone Harris’s way and been a serious blow to Trump.

But it did not move the polls as much as the Harris campaign hoped and her campaign is still tasked with introducing her to US voters. Last week, Harris went on Oprah to help smooth the introduction along.

This week Harris is due to reveal a set of new economic policies. Polls show she is steadily gaining trust on the key issue of the economy, which often favors Trump and the Republican party.

On Sunday, Harris returned to the key themes of the message Democrats wish to underline – a threat to democracy they perceive a second Trump terms represents and the knife-edge that polls suggest the race remains balanced upon.

“This is a man who said he would be a dictator on day one … just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails,” Harris said in New York. “This race is as close as it could be. This is a margin of error race … and I am running and we are running as the underdog.”

Harris called Trump an “unserious man”, but said the consequences of putting him back in the White House were “very serious”.

Head-to-head polls tend to show Harris with a narrow but solid lead over Trump, though the situation is more mixed in the crucial swing states that will decide the race to the White House. That is a reverse of the situation when Biden was in the race, where Trump had established a firm lead over the US president.>

<JD Vance was holding court on CNN’s State of the Union programme. “The American media totally ignored this stuff,” he complained last Sunday, “until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes.”

But it wasn’t just a meme, objected interviewer Dana Bash. The Republican vice-presidential nominee gave a telling response: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do, Dana, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.”

If ever there was a case of saying the quiet part out loud, Vance had perfected the art. The cat memes he referred to were prompted by baseless rumours about legal Haitian immigrants in his home state of Ohio eating house pets – rumours that led to bomb threats and evacuations of schools and government buildings in Springfield.

But Vance’s willingness to “create stories” to grab attention before the November’s election hinted at a new frontier in post-truth America, where a lie is no longer slyly distributed but rather brazenly flaunted as a tactic to win political support and stir up social chaos.

Some commentators draw a parallel with Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway’s coining of “alternative facts” when, on another Sunday politics show back in 2017, she sought to defend then White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s false statements about the crowd size at Trump’s inauguration.

Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said: “It’s a logical continuation of what once was called ‘alternative facts’ by the same camp. It’s obvious that is a long-term mission statement, more than just an offhand comment.

“Their entire strategy is to say anything, make up anything, invent false narratives to try and distract away from the very real consequences of their radical and extreme agenda that is so far out of the mainstream of the American people’s interests. They think they have a better chance of winning by making up insane stories about people eating pets versus having a subsequent conversation about the consequences of their policy agenda.”

Dishonesty in politics is hardly new, from President Richard Nixon’s cover-up of the Watergate scandal to the false claim of weapons of mass destruction used as a pretext for the Iraq war. In 2004, the New York Times Magazine quoted an unnamed official in the George W Bush administration as saying: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

It was fertile soil for Trump, who had spent years exaggerating his personal wealth and charity giving, misleading the public about ventures such as Trump University and even misrepresenting his own height and weight. From 2011, he was a leading promoter of the false conspiracy theory that Barack Obama had been born in Kenya and was therefore not eligible to be US president.

From his inauguration on, Trump made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims during his four years in the White House, according to a count by the Washington Post. He memorably claimed to have presided over the biggest tax cut ever – in fact, Ronald Reagan’s was bigger – and repeatedly downplayed the coronavirus pandemic, telling the public that it would soon “disappear”.

But perhaps the biggest lie of all came on the night of the 2020 presidential election when Trump claimed that he had won. He stuck to this position, arguing that it had been “stolen” from him through widespread voter fraud, ultimately leading to a deadly insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. He has since recast the rioters as martyrs and “patriots”.

Now making his third consecutive bid for the White House, Trump’s mendacity has, if possible, shifted up a gear. He made more than 30 false claims during the presidential debate against Joe Biden in Atlanta, according to a fact-check by host network CNN, but escaped close scrutiny because of Biden’s feeble performance.

In the debate against Harris in Philadelphia, he made false assertions about topics including inflation, immigration, tariffs, House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s role on January 6, Joe Biden’s role in the criminal cases against him and popular support for the overturning of the constitutional right to abortion.

Astonishingly, he also plucked the racist Springfield conspiracy theory from the fever swamps of the internet and gave it a national platform before tens of millions of viewers when he said: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”....>

<....Not for the first time that night, ABC News’s moderators were forced to step in with a fact-check. There is no evidence for such a claim. The Wall Street Journal newspaper reported that on the day Vance first promoted the rightwing rumours, Springfield’s city manager told his office that they were baseless.

Vance’s team gave the Journal a police report in which a resident claimed her cat may have been stolen by Haitian neighbours. But a Journal reporter tracked down the resident and learned that her cat had been in the basement the whole time, prompting her to apologise to her neighbours.

Yet still Trump and Vance persisted with the knowing falsehoods at rally after rally on the campaign trail, undeterred by warnings from the White House that they could stoke an ugly backlash against Haitians in Springfield. Then came Vance’s shocking admission that he would make stuff up and be proud of it.

Days after the CNN interview, Vance continued to defend the comments while admitting that he had not fact-checked residents’ claims about the pets. “The media has a responsibility to fact-check,” he said at a rally in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, in an effort to shift blame.

Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster, said: “What JD Vance is saying is that the facts don’t matter and that I am completely unashamed to have peddled a false story.

“It underlines the degree to which Trump and Vance and the Maga movement are addicted to these fake online internet memes and unshakeable in their attachment to them. Even when they are refuted, they stick with them, which is a dangerous thing because it means that no matter how much evidence you can provide, no matter how dangerous the lies turn out to be, they’re not going to back off.”

Sykes warned: “They’re going to keep pushing. Extrapolate this to what’s going to happen in November and the election results. Extrapolate it to anything.”

On Saturday, Vance is due to appear with conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson on the former Fox News host’s live tour in Hershey, Pennsylvania. This is despite Carlson having recently hosted Nazi apologist and Holocaust denier Darryl Cooper on his podcast, a decision roundly condemned by Jewish members of Congress.

Trump, meanwhile, has been joined on the campaign trail by far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer. She turned up at the debate and then a day later in New York to commemorate the 23rd anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Loomer, who commands a following of 1.2m people on the X social media platform, has previously suggested that 9/11 was an inside job. At a rally in Las Vegas, Trump said he had heard that Harris had used a secret earpiece during their debate, a baseless conspiracy theory that Loomer has promoted on X.

Loomer also posted on X that if Harris, who is of Indian descent, wins the election, “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center”. Even far-right Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene denounced the comment as racist....>

<....Sykes, author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, regards Loomer as a symptom rather than a cause. “Run through a list of all the conspiracy theories that Donald Trump has embraced or pushed and it’s lengthy,” he said. “It’s not as if Laura Loomer is making Donald Trump into a conspiracist. Donald Trump has been one for years. He’s now finding people who will stroke and validate his darker impulses.”

There is another reason for Trump and Vance’s sense of impunity. Their lies originate from and are legitimised by a rightwing media ecosystem that now includes X, formerly Twitter, owned by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, who has endorsed Trump, hosted an interview with him and sought to portray his critics as enemies of free speech.

Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at the watchdog Media Matters for America, said: “This is a rightwing media ticket. Donald Trump and JD Vance are both people who are fully immersed in the information ecosystem of the far right and they’ve adopted its complete lack of standards and willingness to use any means necessary to achieve their ends of political gain and political victory. What we’re seeing here is how these lies can spiral totally out of control. Springfield, Ohio, is experiencing some real chaos right now.”

Heading into the final sprint of the election, where he could face prison if he loses, Trump is surpassing himself with a blitz of falsehoods. On Thursday, CNN’s fact-checkers produced a list of “12 completely fictional stories” that he has told in the last month, including Harris reintroducing the military draft, schools sending children for gender-affirming surgeries without their parents’ knowledge and Harris negotiating with Russian president Vladimir Putin in 2022 in an effort to prevent the invasion of Ukraine.

Michael Steele, a former chair of the Republican National Committee, said: “There’s nothing worse than a desperate man. There’s nothing worse than a desperate racist man who cannot control the woman in front of him who happens to be African American. Cannot control the conditions around him that have changed – the tightening of the political race for the presidency.

“Cannot control what people are saying about him, the fact that Republicans are now coming out and speaking against a second Trump term and are creating lanes in which we are willing to support the Democrat over Donald Trump because he is that bad and that dangerous. When he cannot control that, he becomes even more dangerous and more desperate and you need to be aware of that because there’s more of this coming between now and November.”>

<North Carolina Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson — a staunch conservative and ally of former President Donald Trump — is no stranger to controversy.

During a 2019 Facebook Live video, Robinson said abortion "is about killing the child because you weren't responsible enough to keep your skirt down." In 2023, he said God "formed" him to fight against LGBTQ+ acceptance while also noting that it made him "sick" to see any church fly a Rainbow flag. And earlier this year, he called for the arrest of transgender women who choose to use women's bathrooms.

Despite Robinson's history of polarizing comments, he easily won the state's GOP gubernatorial primary in March. But in a bombshell CNN story published last week, the network reported that Robinson made a series of racist, antisemitic, and sexually explicit comments on a pornographic site more than a decade ago — before he was in public office.

On the site Nude Africa, Robinson describes himself as a "black NAZI!" and argues that "slavery is not bad," among other remarks.

Robinson has denied the accusation and vowed to remain in the race. But even before the report was published, he was behind in the polls against his Democratic opponent, state Attorney General Josh Stein. Meanwhile, Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are locked in a tight race in North Carolina.

Here's a look at how Robinson's scandal could not only imperil Trump's ability to win the Tar Heel State but also potentially obliterate the former president's chances to win the general election.

The swing-state dilemma

Robinson rose to prominence in GOP circles after his forceful defense of gun rights during a 2018 address to the Greensboro City Council went viral. In his speech, he decried what he said were attempts to enact gun control, arguing that criminals would simply ignore the laws.

The speech helped pave the way for Robinson's 2020 victory in a race for lieutenant governor, which he won by three percentage points even as Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper was reelected to a second term.

That year, Trump also won North Carolina — albeit narrowly — against now-President Joe Biden. Anchored by the support of rural conservatives, the then-president eked out a one-point victory in what has become one of the nation's premier swing states.

Robinson's political brand is rooted in a more confrontational Republican style, though. His biggest advantage is with social conservatives, not the sort of college-educated suburban voters who have turned away from the GOP in the Trump era.

It's encapsulated in earlier polling. A New York Times/Siena College poll released in August showed Stein leading Robinson 49% to 39% among likely voters. A Quinnipiac University poll released earlier this month showed Stein up by 10 points (51% to 41%) among likely voters. And a recent Emerson College poll showed Stein ahead of Robinson by eight points (48% to 40%) among likely voters.

Robinson's campaign has stumbled in the state for some time — and it's unclear what the ramifications of the latest allegations will be for his candidacy. But state Treasurer Dale Folwell, who lost to Robinson in this year's gubernatorial primary, last week told the News & Observer that taxpayers and donors were "getting fleeced" by the lieutenant governor.

Such a remark from a fellow statewide GOP official usually doesn't bode well for party unity. And Trump is now caught in that web....>

<....A tale of 'reverse coattails'

When popular candidates are running at the top of the ticket — notably in presidential, gubernatorial, or Senate races — they often boost down-ballot candidates.

A strong candidate leading the party on the ballot can have an immeasurable impact on turnout and enthusiasm for candidates who need help getting over the finish line.

In 2020, Robinson outperformed Trump in North Carolina, but the former president also brought out voters who undoubtedly boosted the lieutenant governor in areas where he wasn't as well known.

Now, Robinson's latest scandal threatens Trump's hold on a state that Harris has targeted since her campaign began in July. The vice president has reversed the slide that the party faced when Biden was the nominee, and recent polls taken in North Carolina have showed her tied with Trump or with a slight lead.

Harris' competitiveness in the state is driven by her advantages with women, young voters, urban voters, and college-educated suburbanites. And she's running a distinctly pro-choice campaign, in contrast to Robinson — an anti-abortion champion who also revealed last month that his wife had an abortion 30 years ago.

Pessimism over Robinson's campaign could depress Trump's numbers in the state, creating a "reverse coattail" effect — especially if Robinson loses by a sizable margin.

The GOP is up against a Harris campaign that's flush with cash and has 26 field offices and over 200 paid staffers in North Carolina. The Harris campaign also released an ad seeking to tie Robinson to Trump, weaving in old footage where the ex-president said the lieutenant governor was "better than Martin Luther King."

Democrats believe that Harris' presence on the ballot will be able to help them in other races.

"[W]hat's very exciting to me is that we have a lot of people that are interested in the top of the ticket, but that are also getting educated about the importance of down-ballot," North Carolina Democratic Party chair Anderson Clayton recently told MSNBC's Chris Hayes.

Should Harris win North Carolina and its 16 electoral votes, she'll likely already be on her way to a national victory, given the state's slight Republican lean in presidential races. However, although she'd clearly like to do so, Harris doesn't have to win the state to win the election.

But North Carolina is critical for Trump. It has been a Southern anchor of support in his last two presidential runs. And the state's penchant for close elections is a reflection of just how much Robinson's woes could ultimately decide Trump's political fate.

During a Saturday rally in Wilmington, Trump seemed to acknowledge that reality. Robinson was not present at the event. And the former president didn't mention the lieutenant governor's name.>

<I used to be a Republican. Right out of college, I worked for the legislature, then governor, of a conservative state. Governor Robert Orr, R-Ind., was disciplined and kind and his ethics were beyond reproach. Fast forward three decades and time spent among different cultures. After seeing trickle-down up close, and how it benefits wealthy donors but few others, my perspective changed. When I ran for Congress in 2020, it was is as strong as.

There’s a wide chasm between policy disagreements and hate, and although my viewpoint evolved over the years, I never hated conservatives. Indiana Republicans, back then, saw political disagreements as healthy conduits to better outcomes. I never heard Orr, or other Republican officials, express hatred for their opponents. They sometimes disparaged them, especially over plans that would leach money from their own pockets, but I never once heard the word "hate," even behind closed doors. Enter Donald Trump and JD Vance, who package and sell hatred as a national commodity.

Trump’s belief that he can foment hatred and infect half the country with it— without falling victim himself—reflects a lack of emotional intelligence.

From the beginning, Trump’s hate-filled rhetoric has been spiked with violence. Reciting a list is like shoveling the walk while it’s still snowing, but last week’s second Trump assassination attempt in as many months sparks a flashback. Trump offered to pay the legal bills of anyone who assaulted his hecklers; suggested peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square be shot; mused that “Second Amendment people” could take out Hillary Clinton; encouraged a violent mob who sought to hang Mike Pence, now calls them “patriots” and “hostages;” and laughed about the vicious hammer attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s elderly husband. Now we have bomb threats in hospitals and elementary schools in Springfield, Ohio after he and Vance falsely claimed that lawful immigrants there are eating their neighbors’ pets.

From "stand back and stand by" to complimenting "very fine people on both sides" of a Nazi demonstration, Trump’s coded vitriol against judges, prosecutors, poll workers, critics, democrats and his own former staff has led to multiple death threats, and yet he persists.

Trump habitually projects his own criminal impulses onto his opponents, so it’s not a leap that he’s now blaming Democrats’ rhetoric for the assassination attempts. It is apparently irrelevant that both would-be assassins were Republicans with mental health problems: Crooks was a registered Republican; Routh voted for Trump in 2016 then supported Ramaswamy in the last primary. Both had guns, while Trump himself revoked mental health checks for gun owners....>

<.... Vance, who is young, has said that Republicans are “hating the right people,” as if hatred is a finite and targeted commodity. How old will he be when he learns that once hatred takes hold, it can’t be contained, directed or controlled?

Hatred becomes a powerful addiction, and Trump’s followers are hooked. Hatred affects dopamine receptor binding such that addiction to hatred is as strong as an addiction to cocaine, except it’s more destructive. A shared addiction to hatred forms a strong social bond because listening to someone spew hatred triggers the same gratifying chemical hit, whereas watching someone else snort cocaine does not.

Extreme hatred also creates motivational bias, which means adherents can only see evidence that supports their beliefs. At the addictive stage, they are blind to any information that challenges their narrative. That’s why reasoning with a hate-infected person won’t work.

When it comes to juicing neurochemical hits in the brain, the target of hatred doesn’t matter. It’s hatred itself that’s addictive, as our brain pays more attention to negative than positive thoughts as an evolutionary, flight or fight response. Hatred operates in the same parts of the brain, the cortex and subcortex, that manage aggression; the path between political hatred and political violence is obvious. When wielded as a political tool, hatred of “other” has re-shaped continents.

In encouraging hatred for legal immigrants, trans people, racial minorities, gays, women and anyone else they can “other,” Trump and Vance know exactly what they are doing. When asked about the bomb threats in Springfield Ohio, Trump doubled down. “I don’t know what happened with the bomb threats. I know that it’s been taken over by illegal migrants and that’s a terrible thing … now they’re going through hell.” He left off that he and Vance created that hell.

Drawing from Zen Buddhism, Eckhart Tolle teaches that angry and violent people are addicted to their thoughts. They hear them on repeat, over and over, and can’t shut them off. Hatred and negativity are so consuming, they look for others to infect. Hatred, like all untreated addictions, consumes its host in the end. Until then, the addicted part of the country will keep marching toward rock bottom, from where, eventually, they will begin the ascent back toward sanity.>

Playing <stalker> here, <micropenis the bottom>? Guess what: this is my forum and I post what I please, where I wish, so go play with your imaginary 'elite posters' so they can tell you how you great you are.

<In theory, Congress is supposed to pass 12 appropriations bills by the end of each fiscal year to fund discretionary spending on defense, as well as non-defense programs like veterans' benefits, education, transportation, and health. In practice, that hasn't happened in more than a quarter century. This year will be no different.

Despite repeated promises to return to a more orderly annual budget process, funding the federal government for three months with a stopgap measure, known as a continuing resolution (C.R.), is the best that Congress can muster.

Over the weekend, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R–La.) introduced a C.R. that would avert a government shutdown by "continu[ing] current funding levels through Dec. 20," reports Roll Call. Johnson described the 12-week plan as "a very narrow, bare-bones CR including only the extensions that are absolutely necessary."

The three-month C.R. is a bipartisan compromise on the six-month C.R. that died on the House floor in a 202-220 vote on Wednesday. The C.R. presently under consideration excludes $10 billion for the Federal Emergency Management Agency and $1.95 billion for the Virginia-class submarine program, as sought by Democrats and Republicans respectively, but retains "$231 million in new appropriations for the Secret Service to provide protection for presidential candidates," per Roll Call.

It's a resounding yet predictable failure of one of Congress' most basic constitutional responsibilities: "to lay and collect taxes…to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States," as described in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.

When Johnson became Speaker of the House, he promised a return to "regular order"—the annual budget process established by the 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act.

But it has been 27 years since Congress has fully funded the federal government by October 1, reports Axios. In fact, not even half of the federal government has been funded on time since 1997.

It's pretty much guaranteed that Congress won't pass a single appropriations bill by October 1. Such a failure would not be an aberration but the "sixth year in a row" that Congress has done so, the Committee for a Responsible Budget (CFRB) laments.

According to the CFRB, Congress hasn't "had a real budget"—one conferenced by the House and Senate together—since the 114th Congress passed House Concurrent Resolution 27 for fiscal year 2016. The resolution provided a 10-year-long framework for federal spending, including a "point of order against increasing long-term deficits or direct spending"; subsequent reconciliation bills have included no such long-term plans and merely funded the short-term operations of the federal government.

Fully funding the government on time has long since stopped being the goal; that "has only happened four times in the 50 years of the current budgeting system," notes Axios. Instead, passing stopgap bills to avert a complete government shutdown is the norm.

With only a week left in the 2024 fiscal year, the House has passed exactly zero of the 12 appropriations bills. Legislators haven't even managed to pass the Legislative Branch Appropriations Act, which pays the salaries of congressional offices and funds the security and maintenance of the Capitol, never mind the rest of the federal government.

So much for an annual budget process.

The House GOP's budget headaches aren't new; lower chamber Republicans have struggled with the budget process for well over a decade. But they are telling.

Fundamentally, budgeting is a process of prioritization. There are no solutions; only trade-offs. The recurring failure to pass a budget shows that no one in Congress—and few in Washington, D.C.—seem to have any desire to make hard decisions.>

<Donald Trump, currently vying for the job of president of the United States, spent part of his Tuesday evening watching a PBS interview with “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert.

Then, he complained about it on social media.

“Why would they be wasting time and the public’s money on this complete and total loser?” the former president wrote on his Truth Social website. “He is not funny, which he gets paid far too much to be, he is not wise, he is VERY BORING, and his show is dying from a complete lack of viewers.”

Trump suggested that CBS fire Colbert and replace him with “almost anyone, right off the street, who would do better, and for FAR LESS MONEY.”

Trump said he knows people who would host the show for free.

“The good news for Stephen is that the two DOPES on NBC & ABC are not much better than him!” he wrote.

Colbert and his wife, Evie, were on PBS to speak about their new cookbook and share family stories. Trump was mentioned only briefly, when NewsHour co-anchor Amna Nawaz asked Colbert if he would have the former president on “The Late Show” as a guest.

“I’ve had him before and he was kinda boring,” Colbert said. “So, no.”

He added he didn’t like guests who are not “honest agents of their own ideas” and said there are many other politicians he wouldn’t have on his show for that same reason.

Trump insisted he only “briefly” watched the interview, but it was the second night in a row that the former president attacked late night TV hosts.

Earlier this week, he lashed out at Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon during a rally in Pennsylvania.

His two chief complaints at that event were a moment from Fallon’s show eight years ago, and a joke Kimmel made at the Oscars more than six months ago.

Trump has long been obsessed with late night comics and while president even tried to have Kimmel censored.>

<Three former chairs of the Maine Republican Party have “enthusiastically” endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris in the race against former President Donald Trump, joining hundreds of Republicans and former GOP administration officials in backing the Democratic nominee.

Robert Monks, Ken Cole and Ted O’Meara made the announcement in an op-ed for the Bangor Daily News.

Recalling a bygone era, they said they led the Maine Republican Party when “candidates of both parties were not only civil and believed in the rule of law” but also “had the best interests of the state and entire nation” in mind, despite any disagreements that may occur.

They added that they see these “positive characteristics “ in the vice president but that they are “completely lacking” in Trump. Monks, Cole, and O’Meara argue that Trump’s sole goal appears to be to divide people across the nation, within communities, families and friends.

“Whether it is race, religion, gender, ethnicity or country of origin, Trump continues to pit us against each other in his frightening, cynical quest to get elected again,” the ex-GOP chairs wrote in the op-ed published on Monday.

Meanwhile, the trio argued that Harris is “collaborative and capable” and, unlike Trump, is “committed to bringing people together.”

The authors said they trust her when she says she intends to be a president for the entirety of the US, before going on to lament that the “big-tent Republican Party” they represented no longer exists: “Trump’s MAGA Republican Party is unrecognizable to us.”

They slammed Trump for the “chaos and lies” and noted the widespread support for Harris among more old-school Republicans such as former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, former top House Republican Representative Liz Cheney, and more than a dozen former Ronald Reagan staffers.

Monks, Cole and O’Meara also noted that over 100 former top Republican officials signed a letter stating that Trump is “unfit to serve again as president, or indeed in any office of public trust.”

The trio lambasted Trump for refusing to state if he wants Ukraine to win the war against Russia during his appearance on the debate stage in Philadelphia on September 10 and for “cozying up to dictators” such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

They cited the worries of European allies at the prospect of a second Trump term and China’s increasing aggression towards Taiwan, adding that the war-torn Middle East “desperately needs calm and determined US leadership.”

Trump’s return to the White House would “make our world a far more dangerous place,” the former GOP state chairs argued.

The Maine Republicans also shared their concerns that Trump and his “Project 2025” agenda would destroy programs “good for Maine people,” such as Medicare, Social Security and protections for pre-existing health conditions via the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

“The key question this fall is whether a majority of Maine people will vote for an America that believes in free and fair elections defends personal freedoms like a woman’s right to choose and get proper health care, and supports a tax structure where everyone pays their fair share,” they added.

“Or will they fall for Trump’s election lies, endanger more of our personal liberties, and enable tax and trade policies that will hurt Maine workers,” they asked.

The trio noted that large parts of the GOP and its leadership have joined the Trump “cult,” the members of which will “care little for what we have to say.”

They instead called on the “many honest, hardworking, principled people” in the Maine Republican Party to join them in backing the vice president.

Monks, Cole and O’Meara went on to quote Republican Georgia Lt. Governor Geoff Duncan and his speech to the Democratic National Convention.

“Let me be clear to my Republican friends at home – If you vote for Kamala Harris in 2024, you’re not a Democrat, you’re a patriot,” Duncan said last month.

“On November 5, be a patriot,” the three Republicans urged their readers.>

<Ted Cruz's campaign team said they are in the "fight of our lives," as recent polling suggested the Texas Senate race is essentially tied.

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, the Team Cruz account posted a link to the Republican's campaign and fundraising website while stating "November 5th is almost here! We are in the fight of our lives."

The post comes after a recent Morning Consult poll of 2,716 likely voters showed that Cruz's Democratic rival, Colin Allred, was ahead in the 2024 Texas Senate race for the first time (45 percent to 44 percent). Allred's lead was within the poll's margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.

Elsewhere, a Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation survey of 1,200 likely Texas voters showed Cruz leading Allred by 3 points (48 percent to 45 percent), nearly within the margin of error of 2.83 percentage points.

The offices of Cruz and Allred were contacted for comment via email.

The polling suggests that Cruz is in another tight reeelction [sic] campaign, just like his 2018 race with former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke.

A number of Democratic figures have suggested that the historically strong red state of Texas could be in play this year as the party hopes to keep hold of the upper chamber, as well as for Kamala Harris in her presidential race with Donald Trump.

If Allred were to flip the Texas senate seat from Cruz in November, he would become the first Democrat [sic] senator in the Lone Star state since 1988.

Michigan Senator Gary Peters, the chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said the party is looking at boosting efforts to flip Texas and Sen. Rick Scott's Florida seat in November.

Speaking to Axios, Peters said Florida and Texas "are real and we hope to get resources into those states."

Flipping either Florida or Texas could be a major plus in the Democrats' hopes to keep control of the Senate, where they effectively have a 51-49 majority.

Polling suggests that Montana Sen. Jon Tester may lose his seat to Republican Tim Sheehy, with the GOP also widely expected to flip the West Virginia seat held by outgoing Democrat-turned-independent senator Joe Manchin in November.

However, forecasters and experts are suggesting that Cruz will still come out on top in the close Texas Senate race.

"Cruz's close call with O'Rourke in 2018 took place in an election year that favored Democratic candidates, and whether 2024 ultimately turns out to favor one party or neither remains to be seen," Joshua Blank, director of research for the Texas Politics Project at The University of Texas at Austin, previously told Newsweek.

"Republicans still maintain an advantaged position in Texas, but that advantage is clearly diminishing, and the electoral environment is a big factor in determining how close the election ultimately turns out to be.

"But barring unforeseen circumstances, I think it's highly unlikely that Allred will beat Cruz in this election, though I still expect a close race," Blank added.

Forecasters Race to the White House are also giving Cruz a 70 percent chance of winning the race.>

<Personal information of more than 3,000 congressional staffers has been leaked across the dark web in a wide-ranging cyberattack on the Capitol, according to reports.

Internet security firm Proton found over 1,800 passwords used by staffers in Congress available on the dark web, through an investigation of exposed accounts among U.S. political staffers, according to The Washington Times.

Proton, which is based in Switzerland and worked with U.S.-based firm Constella Intelligence on the investigation, estimated that almost 1 in 5 congressional staffers had personal information available on the dark web. Proton said the leaks came from several sources, including social media, dating apps, and "adult websites."

In one instance, the report found that a single staffer had 31 passwords exposed online. The full report said that around 3,191 staffers were affected by the leaks overall.

"Many of these leaks likely occurred because staffers used their official email addresses to sign up for various services, including high-risk sites such as dating and adult websites, which were later compromised in data breaches," Proton told The Washington Times.

"This situation highlights a critical security lapse, where sensitive work-related emails became entangled with less secure, third-party platforms."

Eamonn Maguire, Proton's head of account security, said: "The volume of exposed accounts among U.S. political staffers is alarming, and the potential consequences of compromised accounts could be severe.

"Vigilance and strict security measures are essential to safeguard personal and national security."

Proton also said that it would publish more findings over the coming weeks in order to ensure the safety and validity of political systems during the election. The company also contacted all the affected congressional staffers and informed them of the leaks.

Newsweek contacted Proton and the U.S. House of Representatives for further comment.>

Got a problem with the content, <pompous bore>? F*** off and die!

<U.S. Supreme Court justices and federal judges on lower courts do not have to publicly disclose when they dine or stay at someone's personal residence, even one owned by a business entity, under a revised ethics rule.

The amended policy was issued on Monday by the U.S. Judicial Conference's Committee on Financial Disclosure, which sets rules followed by the nine justices and other federal judges. Critics said the move diluted ethics requirements.

The committee has been reviewing allegations that Justice Clarence Thomas, a member of the court's 6-3 conservative majority, improperly failed to report gifts including luxury travel from wealthy Texas businessman and Republican donor Harlan Crow.

"They might as well call it the Clarence Thomas exemption," said Donald Sherman, chief counsel at the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), said of the amended policy.

The U.S. Supreme Court has been embroiled in mounting ethics controversies, with some Democratic lawmakers and court reform advocates pointing to instances of undisclosed trips and gifts involving Thomas and some other justices. The court last year announced its first formal code of conduct governing the ethical behavior of its justices, though the policy lacked any enforcement mechanism.

The judiciary's rule-making body said the disclosure regulations were updated this week to "clarify" the extent to which gifts received at personal residences owned by corporate entities could be deemed "personal hospitality" that judges did not need to list on their disclosure reports.

Gabe Roth, who heads the advocacy group Fix the Court, said the new policy watered down stricter regulations announced last year and "twisted" the meaning of personal hospitality in ways that could result in some of the past stays by Thomas at Crow's properties being deemed exempt from disclosure.

Those stays include ones at Camp Topridge, a private lakeside resort in upstate New York's Adirondack Mountains owned by an entity affiliated with Crow, Topridge Holdings, as first reported by ProPublica.

Thomas last year said that he had been advised he did not have to report that type of "personal hospitality."

Lawyers for Thomas and Crow and representatives for the Supreme Court did not respond to requests for comment.

The disclosure committee, at the urging of Democratic U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and others, in March 2023 adopted stricter regulations that made it harder for judges to claim a personal hospitality exception.

Those rules stated judges still did not have to disclose gifts that include food, lodging or entertainment extended by an individual for a non-business purpose. But the regulations said the exemption did not apply to stays at commercial properties, such as hotels and resorts, and gifts of hospitality paid for by an entity or third-party other than the person providing it.

Under Monday's rule change, stays at a host's personal residence would not need to be disclosed if an entity, rather than a person, owns the property, as long as the residence was not regularly rented out and was not a commercial property.>

<In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s shock victory in 2016, one common explanation for why the Democrats had not seen it coming was that they had succumbed to the social media echo chamber. The fact that many digital platforms, such as Twitter (now X), tended to be dominated by liberals had lured Democrats into a false sense of security. This, so the explanation went, made them complacent, leading to inconsiderate gestures that alienated sections of the electorate: Hillary Clinton’s infamous jab at Trump’s supporters as “deplorables” was often cited as a prime example.

With the internet ever more captive to the caprices of timeline algorithms, the risk of echo chambers is even greater in this election cycle. However, it is now Trump and the broader political right that is – to use the internet lingo – “too online”. The rightwing surge seen in many countries’ recent elections, especially in Europe, has been paralleled (and supported) by a significant rise of the right’s influence online. As documented by much academic research on social media and politics, the leading influencers on platforms such as YouTube, X and the instant messaging platform Telegram are rightwing. On many of these platforms, the conversation has increasingly shifted towards rightwing themes and positions, with rightwing messages tending to circulate more widely.

This social media hegemony, which has been in the making for many years and was cemented by Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, has now created a right that harbours a similar sense of delusion and complacency to the one that, in the past, has proved so detrimental for progressives.

Consider the way vice-presidential candidate JD Vance has brazenly doubled down on his 2021 comment about “childless cat ladies”; or widely ridiculed – and dangerous – online hoaxes about cats and dogs being eaten by Haitian immigrants, which appear to have travelled from Facebook to the mouth of the Republican candidate in a matter of days; or Musk’s creepy rebuke concerning Taylor Swift after the pop singer endorsed Kamala Harris, offering to “give her a child”. Such extreme messaging does cater to the Maga (Make America great again) crowd of true believers – but it comes at the electoral cost of potentially alienating large swaths of the moderate voting-age population.

As political scientists have long observed, a party’s rank and file is more ideologically extreme than its electorate. If leaders get trapped in the militant core, they can end up developing an unrealistic appraisal of the opinion of their target voters. This is precisely what 24/7 immersion in social media, with their plebiscitary pseudo-democracy of instant reactions and echo chambers, is all too likely to produce.

Obsession with social media and its popularity contest can also lead to unwise choice of political personnel. JD Vance was appointed as running mate by Trump on the back of vocal support from Silicon Valley and the fervour of his social media followers. Yet, Vance is viewed favourably by a miserly 36% of the electorate, compared with 48% support for his opponent Tim Walz, according to a recent USA Today poll. Trump himself has been criticised by allies because of his closeness to internet personality Laura Loomer, a self-described “white advocate” who has built a successful career by catering to far-right digital cesspits....>

<....A key factor in this radicalisation spiral has been Musk’s transformation of broadly liberal Twitter into the reactionary X. Spending $44bn on the purchase certainly made no economic sense, but it seemed to make much political sense. Taking the reins of a platform widely recognised as a sort of “social media of record”, or official debating chamber of the internet, capable of shaping the news agenda and public perception, offered the opportunity to fiddle with the formation of public opinion – and this is precisely what Musk did in three ways

First, he has shamelessly granted himself enormous algorithmic privileges, which reportedly boost his messages by a factor of 1,000. He has used this colossal power of amplification by conversing with, and therefore boosting, hard-right extremist accounts, spreading fake news and publishing AI-manufactured images, such as one showing Kamala Harris in communist attire.

Second, by reactivating tens of thousands of accounts – including those of Nazis and antisemites – who had been suspended or banned for violating community guidelines, Musk has goaded liberal and left users to leave the platform out of disgust, therefore effectively shifting the balance of the conversation to the right.

Third, there have been the effects of his “blue check” scheme, which has fundamentally transformed the dynamics of participation on the platform. Now, in any conversation, the top replies are from people with blue checks, who appear to be overwhelmingly right-leaning, largely because of the way more progressive users have boycotted the service out of their animosity towards Musk.

Musk’s “Twitter coup” has offered a new home to those who had retreated to Maga platforms such as Truth Social and Parler. But in so doing it has also led to the creation of a macroscopic reactionary echo chamber, which feeds into the right’s confirmation bias and self-complacency.

Ultimately, the reason why rightwing politicians and their billionaire allies invest so much energy and resources into social media is that these platforms can influence people’s opinions in a more organic way than traditional forms of political communication. The irony here is that in attempting to use its money and power to shift the discursive dial, the right might have inadvertently undermined its own prospects.>

<A federal appeals court on Tuesday weighed a Republican challenge to Mississippi counting mail ballots that arrive within five days of an election as long as they’re postmarked by that date, in a showdown that could wind up at the US Supreme Court.

While Mississippi isn’t a battleground state in the Nov. 5 presidential race — Donald Trump is expected to clinch its six electoral votes — the case could fuel other 2024 legal challenges in states with similar rules four years after the pandemic made absentee voting an election flash-point.

Trump and Republicans are challenging state laws that they contend make voting less secure. State election officials across the political spectrum are again defending the process, rebuffing claims that it opens the door to fraud. The Republican National Committee and Mississippi GOP sued the state, and appealed to the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals after losing in a lower court.

Looming over the arguments is the proximity to Nov. 5. The three-judge panel pressed the Republicans’ lawyer to explain what they wanted and why changing state law only six weeks before the vote wouldn’t violate the US Supreme Court’s guidance against last-minute action by federal courts, often referred to as the Purcell principle.

Attorney Conor Woodfin replied that they aren’t asking the appeals court to block the law. Woodfin said the 5th Circuit should rule on the legal question of whether Mississippi’s receipt of ballots after Nov. 5 violated a federal law setting a uniform Election Day and then send the case back to the lower court. Woodfin added the district judge would decide what to do and whether it was too late to order a change by Nov. 5.

The 5th Circuit put the case on an expedited track. Depending on how quickly the panel rules after arguments, there could be time for the losing side to petition the justices to intervene before November.

The 5th Circuit is considered one of the most conservative federal appeals courts. The panel hearing the Mississippi case — Judges James Ho, Kyle Duncan and Andrew Oldham — were nominated by Trump.

Mississippi — whose Republican state officials are being backed in court by the Democratic Party and the Biden administration — argues that an “election” is the day when voters make their “final choice.” When a state finishes counting those votes is separate, Mississippi argues.

The Republican and Libertarian Party organizations, whose separate lawsuits against Mississippi were consolidated, counter that state officials must have ballots in hand on Nov. 5 to comply with Congress setting federal elections for the Tuesday after the first Monday in November.

Mississippi is one of 18 states, along with Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Washington, DC, that counts absentee ballots arriving after Election Day as long as they’re postmarked on time, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The Democratic National Committee said in its brief that the number is larger accounting for other states that count late-arriving ballots for overseas and military voters.

Of the seven battleground states, only Nevada counts mail ballots that arrive after Election Day, according to the NCSL. The RNC has lost cases in federal and states courts challenging Nevada’s process and is pursuing appeals.

A Mississippi federal judge upheld the state’s law in July, concluding there was no conflict between Congress setting a national Election Day and a state setting a “reasonable interval” for ballots mailed by that date to arrive and be counted.

The case has created some unusual political dynamics. Mississippi’s Republican secretary of state and attorney general are defending the law against a challenge from the state and national GOP. The DNC joined the case as an amicus or “friend of court” to support Mississippi, but the state opposed giving the party time to argue, saying it wasn’t necessary. The court granted the DNC several minutes.

The US Justice Department filed a brief in the lower court and the 5th Circuit to make clear that the federal government’s position is that Mississippi’s law — and others like it — comply with US election laws and protect military and overseas voters. Government lawyers wrote that there was historical precedent dating back to the Civil War.>

<Utah voters will not decide this November on a constitutional amendment asking voters to cede power over ballot measures to lawmakers after the Utah Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld a lower court decision voiding the amendment.

The five-justice panel grilled attorneys for the Legislature earlier Wednesday before siding with opponents of the amendment who argued it would have been presented to voters in a misleading manner. Republican legislative leaders, who penned the ballot question, had asked the high court to overturn a district judge's ruling and put Amendment D back before the public.

The amendment would have given lawmakers constitutional authority to rewrite voter-approved ballot measures or repeal them entirely. Lawmakers also could have applied their new power to initiatives from past election cycles.

But the summary that voters would have seen on their ballots only asked if the state constitution should be changed to “strengthen the initiative process” and to clarify the roles of legislators and voters.

“The description does not submit the amendment to voters ‘with such clarity as to enable the voters to express their will,'" the high court wrote in its opinion.

The justices said District Judge Dianna Gibson ruled correctly in mid-September when she ordered that any votes cast for or against the amendment should not count. She ruled that the ballot question language was “counterfactual” and did not disclose to voters the unfettered power they would be handing to state lawmakers.

The state Supreme Court also agreed with Gibson's assessment that the Legislature had failed to publish the ballot question in newspapers across the state during the required time frame.

Because of ballot-printing deadlines, the amendment text will still appear on Utah ballots this November, but votes will not be counted.

Utah Democrats were quick to celebrate the ruling, which blocked a ballot question that state party chair Diane Lewis called “intentionally deceitful.”

“Today’s Supreme Court decision ensures that voters can make their voices heard, despite all the Republican supermajority’s attempts to trick Utahns into giving away their power,” Lewis said.

In a joint statement, Senate President Stuart Adams and House Speaker Mike Schultz called the ruling troubling and said it was a sad day for the state.

Their next opportunity to place a similar proposal on the ballot will be in 2026.

“The Legislature offered the court a way to preserve the voting rights of all Utahns, but instead, the court took the chance to vote on Amendment D out of the voters' hands," the Republican legislative leaders said.

Republican Gov. Spencer Cox said last week during his monthly televised news conference at KUED-TV that he thought Gibson's lower court opinion was “compelling,” but he declined to say whether he thought the ballot question was misleading.

“It is important that the language is clear and conveys what the actual changes will do,” Cox said. “I do hope that, eventually, the people of Utah will get a chance to weigh in and decide one way or another how this is going to go. I think that’s very important, but it is important that we get it right.”

Justices agreed that voters should eventually have an opportunity to decide if they want to give lawmakers greater power to change citizen-approved initiatives, but only if the question is presented in a way that complies with the state constitution.

The amendment marked lawmakers’ first attempt to circumvent another Utah Supreme Court ruling from July, which found that the Legislature has very limited authority to change laws approved through citizen initiatives.

Frustrated by that decision, legislative leaders in August used their broadly worded emergency powers to call a special session in which both chambers approved placing an amendment on the November ballot. Democrats decried the decision as a “power grab,” while many Republicans argued it would be dangerous to have certain laws on the books that could not be substantially changed.

Taylor Meehan, an attorney for the Legislature, defended the proposal before the state Supreme Court earlier Wednesday, arguing that a reasonably intelligent voter would be able to understand the intent of the ballot question. She said the summary that appears on the ballot is not required to educate voters about the effects of the amendment and is meant to point people to the full text to learn more.

Mark Gaber, an attorney for the League of Women Voters, argued voters would not assume a ballot summary was false and should not be expected to go searching for accurate information.>

<Senator Mitt Romney is “seriously” concerned Donald Trump will target him and his family if he is re-elected in November, his biographer has revealed.

The Republican became the first senator to vote to convict a president of his own party during Trump’s first impeachment trial. Romney was asked by McKay Coppings, his biographer, whether he fears his family would be targeted by Trump if he beats Kamala Harris in the election given their history.

He initially said: “It’s hard for me to imagine that President Trump would take the time to go out and see if [he] can find something on members of my family.”

When pressed again about how his family could be affected, the senator responded: “I’ve got 25 grandkids! How am I going to protect 25 grandkids, two great-grandkids? I’ve got five sons, five daughters-in-law—it’s like, we’re a big group,” The Atlantic reports.

Trump has often threatened to “go after” his enemies. In a speech last year he said: “In 2016, I declared, ‘I am your voice. Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.”

In a Truth Social post from August 2023, he also wrote: “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”

And he has vowed to use the Justice Department to target his enemies. “I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, the entire Biden crime family, and all others involved with the destruction of our elections, borders and our country itself,” Trump also said last year.

The 77-year-old senator, who is about to retire, said he does not believe Trump is “all bluster.”

“I think he has shown by his prior actions that you can take him at his word,” he told Coppings. “So I would take him at his word.”

Coppings says Romney is preparing for what a Trump win means for him and his family.

“He is thinking seriously about what it will mean to be on a president’s enemies list,” he told KSL TV this week. “Donald Trump has said repeatedly that he will seek retribution against his political enemies when he comes back to the White House if he wins, and I think Trump means that, and Romney is kind of preparing for that reality.”

Romney’s fears have been echoed by Trump’s former lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen, who has revealed he is working on getting a foreign passport and a totally new name as a back-up in case Trump wins in November.

Cohen, who in 2018 pleaded guilty to lying to Congress, testified against the former president during his hush money criminal trial back in May.

Now, Cohen believes that he would be at the top of Trump’s retribution list if he defeats Vice President Kamala Harris in the presidential election.

As a result, the former fixer revealed on MSNBC’s Deadline: White House on Tuesday that he will likely flee the country if a second Trump term does materialize, saying he is already “working on a foreign passport” under an assumed name.>

<We’ve documented many times the false claims that former president Donald Trump has made about his achievements during his presidency. But there are also instances when Trump claims credit for something that either former president Barack Obama or President Joe Biden did. Here’s a recent sampling.

Capped insulin at $35 a month

“Low INSULIN PRICING was gotten for millions of Americans by me, and the Trump Administration, not by Crooked Joe Biden. He had NOTHING to do with it. It was all done long before he so sadly entered office. All he does is try to take credit for things done by others, in this case, ME!”

— Trump, in a social media post, June 8

“And Kamala and Crooked Joe, they try and take credit for $35 insulin. But I was the one that did the $35 insulin, not them.”

— Trump, in a rally speech in Wilkes-Barre, Penn., Aug. 17

“I got insulin down, and they took credit for it, but I got it down to $35. And I said, ‘I hope I win because somebody’s going to take credit.’ It takes a period of time before it kicks in statutorily. And I got it down to $35, which was a very low price, and they took credit for it, which is, you know, now, I’m taking credit because I’m talking to you.”

President Biden says he didn't 'sense' reluctance from Democrats, insists he would have beat Trump

— Trump, in an interview with comedian Theo Von, Aug. 20

In a constant refrain, Trump accuses Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris of claiming credit for imposing a $35-per-month cap on insulin; in one speech, he denounced it as “a lie.” But this is highly misleading, especially when he says Biden and Harris had nothing to do with a $35 cap.

Trump did establish a voluntary, time-limited model for a $35 monthly cap on insulin that was available only to some seniors enrolled in certain insurance plans. Fewer than half of Medicare Part D prescription drug plans chose to participate, and they were able to select which insulin products would be available at $35. Medicare estimated that the two-year model was made available to about 800,000 Medicare enrollees who used insulin.

Naturally, when Trump ran for reelection in 2020, he falsely claimed that the $35 cap was available to every senior. When he announced the temporary program in 2020, he jabbed, “Sleepy Joe can’t do this.”

Even today, notice how Trump, in one interview, said the program took a “period of time before it kicks in statutorily.” That misleadingly suggests he passed a law, not just authorized a temporary pilot program.

A law is what Biden achieved. Over the opposition of the pharmaceutical industry, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (passed with a tiebreaking vote in the Senate by Harris) permanently required all Part D plans to charge no more than $35 per month for all insulin products; it also limited cost sharing for insulin covered under Part B (Medicare medical insurance) to $35 per month. KFF, a nonprofit health-policy organization, estimated that nearly 3.3 million Americans would benefit from this provision of the law. That’s four times more than people who were covered under Trump’s temporary measure.

Trump announced a small pilot program for a group of seniors with an expiration date; Biden passed a law that benefited every senior. There’s no comparison.

Lowest Black unemployment rate

“Achieved the lowest African American unemployment rate, the lowest ever.”

— Trump, in remarks to Black American business leaders, June 26

The current Black unemployment statistic has been in existence for about 50 years. It fell to 5.3 percent for two months in 2019 during Trump’s presidency before rising to 6.1 percent in February 2020 — and then of course soared above 15 percent during the pandemic.

Trump keeps talking about this “lowest ever” achievement but the Biden-Harris administration topped his brief record. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the Black unemployment rate reached a new low of 4.8 percent in April 2023. The unemployment rate was lower or matched Trump’s 5.3 percent for a total of five months under Biden. As of August, the rate is 6.1 percent....>

<....Passed VA Choice

“In my first term, I gave the VA Choice and made it permanent. You know, VA Choice, when you don’t have a doctor, you go, and you go outside. I mean, people were waiting for four months, for five months. You people probably know it. You have friends that know it very well. They go in for something that was not a big deal, and they’d end up being terminally ill because they couldn’t get to see a doctor. So, I created and have VA Choice. They’d been wanting to do it for 57 years. I got it done, passed in Congress.”

— Trump, remarks to National Guard Association Conference in Detroit, Aug. 26

This was a favorite claim during Trump’s presidency — he said it more than 200 times, according to our database of Trump’s false and misleading claims — but he actually signed the MISSION Act, which was a modest update of the VA Choice law passed by Obama in 2014. The Obama legislation expanded veterans’ ability to go to private doctors.

In 2020, our colleague Ashley Parker documented how this falsehood took root, using it as an example of Trump’s method. “The president’s handling of the VA Choice legislation offers a crystalline window into the anatomy of a Trump lie: the initial false claim, the subsequent embellishment and gilding, the incessant repetition and the clear evidence that he knows the truth but chooses to keep telling the falsehood — all enabled by aides either unwilling or unable to rein him in,” she wrote.

It’s four years later, and Trump is still trying to claim credit for Obama’s achievement.

Saved the auto industry

“When I came into office, the auto industry was on its knees, gasping its last breaths after eight long years of Obama and Biden … It is no exaggeration to state the Trump presidency and the deftly used and applied Trump tariffs and taxes saved the American auto industry from extinction time and time again.”

— Trump, remarks at a campaign rally in Clinton Township, Mich., Sept. 27, 2023

Yet another false claim. During the 2008-2009 Great Recession, Obama (and George W. Bush before him) saved the auto industry with significant interventions. Obama’s Treasury Department, for instance, organized taxpayer-financed reorganizations of General Motors and Chrysler. The auto industry was in good shape when Trump took office in 2017.

Auto retail jobs under Trump declined 77,000 from February 2017 to February 2021, according to the BLS. Auto and auto parts manufacturing jobs saw a slight increase — 2,500 jobs — in the same period. If one looks at job creation before the pandemic tanked the economy, there were 61,000 new auto manufacturing jobs and 38,000 auto retail jobs under Trump though February 2020.

But compare that to Obama’s record: a gain of 238,000 auto manufacturing jobs and 332,000 auto retail jobs. That’s a total of 570,000 jobs — more than five times more than Trump’s pre-pandemic number. Under Biden, auto manufacturing jobs have risen 125,000 and auto retail jobs 146,000 — almost three times more than Trump’s pre-pandemic number. (In a speech on Tuesday in Savannah, Ga., Trump falsely said “our auto industry has been decimated.”)

As for Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum helping the auto industry, that’s wrong too. Automakers reported that Trump’s tariffs cost hundreds of millions of dollars in profits and led to job losses and plant closings.>

<Everyone knows that you don’t change the rules in the middle of the game just because you don’t like the way the game is going — everyone, that is, except Donald Trump and his MAGA allies.

Four years ago, they complained bitterly that states were not following long established rules in the conduct of the presidential election. Today, Trump and his friends have changed their tune, with a well-developed strategy designed to make sure that the rules of the 2024 election will rebound to their advantage.

It has already produced results.

The Brennan Center for Justice reports that “between January 1 and December 31, 2023, at least 14 states enacted 17 restrictive voting laws, all of which will be in place for the 2024 election.” Backed by the former president, those changes will mean voters “now face additional hurdles to reach the ballot box.”

The report goes to on specify: “Most of the restrictions limit mail voting, such as requiring additional information on a mail ballot application, shortening the window to request a mail ballot, or banning drop boxes.” In addition, “at least six states enacted seven election interference laws….Many create criminal penalties for election workers for minor mistakes such as not allowing a poll watcher to stand close enough to voters.”

Such efforts did not end last year. They are continuing even as voters in several states have already started casting their ballots.

Last week, we saw new evidence of these efforts in Nebraska and Georgia. Those efforts are nakedly partisan and threaten to throw a wrench into the campaign as it enters the home stretch.

State legislators and election officials in those and other states must remember that their duty is to ensure the fairness and integrity of the electoral process, not follow the MAGA playbook. They should be guided by the wisdom of the “Purcell Principle,” which, as SCOTUSblog explains, holds that “courts should not change election rules during the period of time just prior to an election because doing so could confuse voters and create problems for officials administering the election.”

That principle derives from the 2006 Supreme Court case Purcell v. Gonzalez, which dealt with an Arizona law (Proposition 200) “requiring voters to present proof of citizenship when they register to vote and to present identification when they vote on election day.”

A lower court had barred Arizona from enforcing Proposition 200 a mere four weeks before the 2006 midterm elections. The Supreme Court was troubled by such a change in election procedures “just weeks before an election.”

“Court orders affecting elections,” the justices wrote, “can themselves result in voter confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls. As an election draws closer, that risk will increase.”

Strictly speaking, the Purcell Principle applies only to courts. But its concerns about voter confusion, and the possibility that late rules changes might have a deleterious effect on voting, should be the concern of legislators, election officials and even candidates for office, not just judges.

Trump and his allies care less about the possibility of voter confusion and keeping voters away from the polls than they do about changing the rules to gain electoral advantage.

Just look at what they tried to do in Nebraska. According to a state law adopted in 1991, the state does not “use the winner-take-all approach to awarding electoral votes. The winner of the popular vote gets two electoral votes, while one is assigned to the winner of each of the state’s three congressional districts.”

It is one of only two states, the other being Maine, that awards its electoral votes in this manner. Nebraska Public Media notes that bills recently “have been introduced in Wisconsin, Michigan, and New Hampshire to go to a split electoral system, but they’ve stalled in legislatures.”

Nebraska is a reliably Republican state. The last time it voted for a Democratic presidential candidate was 1964.

But twice — in 2008 and in 2020 — its Second Congressional District, which includes Omaha, cast its one electoral vote for the Democratic presidential candidate. The first time, it went to Barack Obama; the second time was to Joe Biden.

With the 2024 election being a toss-up, Team Trump launched a full-court press to get the state’s Republican-dominated unicameral legislature to change its election laws. As ABC News reports, he wants “to reapportion the three electors awarded to the winner of each of the state’s three congressional districts, instead awarding all five of them to the overall victor of the state.”.....>

<....All five members of Nebraska’s congressional delegation have vocally supported Trump’s desire to change the rules. On Sept. 18, they wrote a letter to their state legislative colleagues saying that “the state should speak with a united voice in presidential elections….After all, we are Nebraskans first, not members of Nebraska’s three congressional districts.”

Trump himself has intervened, speaking to at least one Nebraska legislator about the need for the change.

Leaving no stone unturned, he dispatched the ever-loyal Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) to go to Nebraska and lobby on his behalf. Between now and Election Day, Nebraska officials can expect more calls from Trump and visits from MAGA luminaries.

While it appears the move has been thwarted in Nebraska, thanks to Gov. Jim Pillen’s failure to call a special legislative session, the Trump strategy of changing the rules in middle of the game has been more successful in Georgia.

Last Friday, less than a month before early voting begins in that state, the Georgia State Election Board approved a rule change “requiring counties in the critical presidential battleground to hand-count the total number of ballots this year.”

The Washington Post explains that “the move was spearheaded by a pro-Trump majority that has enacted a series of changes to the state’s election rules in recent weeks and approved the hand-count requirement despite a string of public commenters who begged board members not to.”

The new rule “requires the hand count to take place the night of the November election or the next day.” Election officials from across the state said that doing so “would be physically impossible in all but the smallest counties,” and Chris Carr, the state’s Republican attorney general, said “that state law does not permit hand-counting ballots at the precinct level.”

But to no avail.

If Trump does not win Georgia, the new rule seems likely, as the New York Times put it, to “significantly delay the reporting of results in the battleground state” and inject the kind of chaos into the 2024 election that the Supreme Court has warned would accompany late changes in election rules and procedures.

If Trump loses, Americans need to buckle up and ready themselves for a post-election period every bit as difficult and damaging to democracy as what happened after the 2020 election.>