From July through September, as the U.S. Senate race in South Carolina went from contested to competitive, Democrat Jamie Harrison dropped more money on ads than any Senate candidate of either party has ever spent, on everything, in a single quarter. Harrison’s campaign reported an astonishing $44 million in television, radio, and digital advertising spending in the third quarter of 2020, when it also posted a fundraising record, bringing in more than $57 million in contributions backing Harrison’s challenge to Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham. The Democrat’s campaign also passed along more than $4 million to the state Democratic Party. They’ve invested […]
Mitch McConnell
23 posts
Stopping Mitch McConnell from his latest SCOTUS power grab will take an act of providence even with three GOP senators sidelined by COVID-19 and Senate rules requiring an in-person vote to advance the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett and then confirm her before the election. There is nothing McConnell won’t do to get Barrett on the Supreme Court. If senators infected with COVID can’t be in Washington, he could change the rules about in-person voting, just for SCOTUS nominations, the same way he deployed the so-called nuclear option to end the filibuster so he could confirm Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh with […]
Even if Donald Trump gets voted out of office in November (and actually leaves), Trump-appointed judges with lifetime seats on the federal bench have already dramatically changed the face of our courts in Donald Trump’s image on a whole range of issues. The effects of the relentless push by Senate Leader Mitch McConnell to pack the courts with Trump’s picks is being directly felt in rulings to restrict voting rights and curtail immigration. Even if Joe Biden wins the presidency, his policies and legislative remedies will face legal challenges that before Trump took over the courts would have been tossed out. […]
President Donald Trump isn’t a threat to American democracy on a metaphorical level. He’s a threat to the country’s entire political structure, literally, according to two academics who have studied American democracy throughout history and wrote a whole book on the topic. Dr. Robert C. Lieberman, Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University and co-author of Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy, joined Rick Wilson and Molly Jong-Fast on this episode of The New Abnormal to share which of the “four pillars” that help sustain democracy Trump has completely bulldozed over (hint: all of them.) According to Dr. […]
Joe Biden didn’t mince words as Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump abuse and corrupt the Constitution in their rush to fill Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court. “The infection this president has unleashed on our democracy can be fatal. Enough. Enough. Enough.” He has since added that expanding the Court is a legitimate question. Biden sees McConnell’s desire for total unitary executive, judiciary and legislative control for what it is: A tyranny of extremism. Source link
How fast the Supreme Court nominee talk began, with the monumental life that precipitated it surreally relegated in its shadow. It’s there in Donald Trump’s creepy, elated stump speeches, and Mitch McConnell’s pathetic justifications for his own hypocrisy; in the liberal scramble to avert their idea of disaster; and in the glassy eyes of pundits who rack up their appearance fees chatting ever so amiably about the violations of our democracy. It’s there in Meghan McCain’s foghorn petulance which makes The View so often unwatchable. Everyone is in on the game, ghouls at a poisonous feast. Source link
Most everyone following the heated U.S. Senate contest in South Carolina recognizes that the opening of a U.S. Supreme Court seat—six weeks before Election Day—has shifted the balance of the race. Which candidate will ultimately benefit, though, depends on who you ask. Sen. Lindsey Graham was already facing a determined challenge from Democrat Jaime Harrison before Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death last Friday. Less than a day later, Graham officially discarded his stance from 2016 that high court appointments shouldn’t be made in an election year—and fully embraced his role as President Donald Trump’s warrior in securing a third Supreme Court […]
There’s a Jewish tradition that someone who dies on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, must have been a tzaddik, a righteous person. After all, God waited all year to carry out the decree. Perhaps that offers some comfort to those mourning the loss of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Hebrew name, Yita Ruchel bat Tzirel Leah), who finally succumbed to cancer at the age of 87, after convincing many of us that she was immortal. But the themes of Rosh Hashanah offer another lesson as well: a warning to those Republican senators pondering whether or not to support Senate Majority Leader […]
Delayed prescriptions, mailboxes being toted away, Americans dying and families wondering if they’ll get evicted. The nation in multiple major crises seems like a great time for the Senate to go on vacation, at least in Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s eyes. In this members-only episode of The New Abnormal, Sen. Gary Peters, Sr. (D-MI), who is leading the investigation into the United States Postal Service backlog, explains this postal shitshow to co-host Molly Jong-Fast and producer Jesse Cannon—and how Mitch McConnell is screwing over the American people from a comprehensive COVID relief package. “So the negotiations started finally,” says Peters, “but […]
WASHINGTON ― Senate Republicans’ proposed $1 trillion coronavirus relief package includes at least $7 billion for weapons programs, part of $29 billion for defense overall. The 177-page draft appropriations legislation unveiled Monday included funding for military helicopters, aircraft, ships and missile defense systems. The bill also includes $11 billion to reimburse defense contractors for coronavirus-related expenses, as authorized by Section 3610 of the CARES Act. Defense firms and trade associations have lobbied for the funding, fearing the Pentagon would otherwise have to tap modernization and readiness accounts. The legislation’s release marks the end of weeks of wrangling between the White House […]
WASHINGTON ― As Congress works to reach a deal on their next stimulus package, trade groups are urging lawmakers to extend the window for reimbursing government contractor costs for COVID-19 connected disruptions and cost increases, set to close Sept. 30. Government contractors, “are continuing to face the same ‘ready state’ workforce sustainment challenges that justified” the initial authorization of reimbursements under Section 3610 of the CARES Act, the National Defense Industrial Association and seven other groups said in the latest letter Friday to lobby top congressional leaders. They called for the deadline to be moved to Dec. 31, 2020, in the […]
WASHINGTON ― The White House and Senate Republicans are nearing an agreement on a $1 trillion-plus economic rescue proposal that would also seek $21 billion for defense, according to a draft obtained by the New York Times on Thursday. The emerging GOP proposal would include $11 billion in payments to contractors under the Section 3610 of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, which allowed firms serving the federal government to seek reimbursement for pandemic-related expenses. However, amid reports of internal divisions―over the defense money and other aspects―Republicans delayed the rollout to at least next week. Defense trade associations, along […]
WASHINGTON ― Congress went two-for-two swatting down measures to slash the national security budget by $74 billion, rejecting a proposal Wednesday from Sen. Bernie Sanders to redirect the money toward domestic needs. The Senate voted 23-77 against an amendment to its version of the $740.5 billion annual defense policy bill. Progressives floated the plan to use defense dollars (excluding salaries and health care of military personnel) to address the pandemic’s economic fallout. The amendment’s sponsors argued the social spending would better align with people’s needs and views and that national security should be redefined in the wake of the global pandemic. […]
One of the few remaining areas of broad bipartisan consensus on Capitol Hill has been a tough policy toward Russia— a topic that frequently creates a stark contrast to President Trump, who has maintained personally warm ties to its leader, Vladimir Putin, and has generally followed behind Congress on Russia counter-measures. But the cognitive dissonance between those things proved increasingly difficult to square on Tuesday for members of the GOP after reporting in the New York Times detailed that Trump was briefed on a Russian effort to place bounties on U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The report said that Trump was given […]
LOUISVILLE, KY- After disastrous primary showcases in Wisconsin and Georgia, voting rights advocates turned their eyes to Kentucky amid national concern that the state’s Tuesday primary could be the latest to offer a troubling portrait of voting during the coronavirus pandemic. In the days before the election, hallmarks of what made other elections in a time of COVID hellish were unfolding: In Jefferson County, only one polling site, albeit a large one, was open Tuesday. That made the Kentucky Exposition Center the lone in person polling location for the area that includes the state’s largest city of Louisville. A similar scene […]
It’s the highest-profile job listing in Washington these days: being the public face of one of the biggest government accountability projects in U.S. history. The gig entails five years of exhaustive work to safeguard trillions of taxpayer dollars. The successful applicant will have years of experience in public service, comfort with constant public criticism, and a vision for the job that’s acceptable to two sworn political adversaries with an abysmal working relationship. And the job’s main deliverable is nothing short of ensuring that a program meant to haul the U.S. economy back from the worst crisis since the Great Depression works […]
Congress would pump $100 billion into the National Science Foundation for research into artificial intelligence, quantum computing, advanced communications, robotics and more under a bipartisan… Source link
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) ate some crow on Thursday night, admitting that he was “wrong” when he claimed earlier this week that President Barack Obama didn’t leave his successor with “any kind of game plan” for a pandemic. During a Trump campaign chat with presidential daughter-in-law Lara Trump on Monday night, the Kentucky lawmaker blasted Obama for calling President Donald Trump’s coronavirus response an “absolute chaotic disaster,” saying the “classless” former president “should have kept his mouth shut.” McConnell went on to then falsely claim that the Obama administration left the incoming staff in the lurch when it came […]
Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) has provided information to federal law enforcement and financial authorities about the sales of millions of dollars of stock owned by her and her husband in the wake of a closed-door Senate briefing on the coronavirus in January, Loeffler’s office said on Thursday. Loeffler and her husband, New York Stock Exchange CEO Jeff Sprecher, unloaded millions in equities in the weeks after that briefing, as U.S. stock markets tanked, even as the two acquired a stake in a popular teleconferencing company whose stock has increased in value since that purchase. The Daily Beast first reported those transactions […]
Looking back now, I was likely beginning my journey to leaving the Republican Party on September 9, 2009, when Barack Obama was addressing a Joint Session of Congress and Representative Joe Wilson, Republican of South Carolina, shouted “you lie” in the middle of the president’s address. The president looked in the direction of the shout, calmly said, “it’s not true” and continued. The House rebuked Wilson a week later, but notably that vote came on party lines, and the tone had been set. The next year, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared that “The single most important thing we want to […]
One night after taking down the haters who threatened his family over a misleading Mike Pence joke, Jimmy Kimmel was back at it Tuesday night. And he didn’t miss a beat when it came to hammering the Trump administration for its continued failures around the COVID-19 crisis. As the late-night host pointed out, President Trump is declaring that America has “prevailed” on the very same day Dr. Anthony Fauci is warning that re-reopening the country too soon could lead to “needless suffering and death.” “So I guess it just comes down to who you believe: the doctor who is one of […]
Days after the Justice Department controversially dropped charges against Mike Flynn, Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is set to expand a highly political Justice Department’s surveillance authorities during a vote this week to renew the 2001 PATRIOT Act. Under cover of redressing what President Trump and his allies call the FBI’s “witch hunt” over collusion with the Kremlin, McConnell, via an amendment to the PATRIOT Act, will expressly permit the FBI to warrantlessly collect records on Americans’ web browsing and search histories. In a different amendment, McConnell also proposes giving the attorney general visibility into the “accuracy and completeness” of […]
Defying public-health guidelines and putting senators at risk to elevate a favorite judge to the second highest court in the land, Mitch McConnell behaves like a man who knows his time is running out. He’s already filled some 200 federal judgeships with young, Federalist Society approved conservatives poised to overturn the Affordable Care Act. With the election looking iffy for the president, McConnell has dropped all pretense of an unbiased judiciary in his rush to beat the clock. At a sparsely attended Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday morning, 37-year-old Kentucky District Judge Justin Walker, a McConnell favorite who’s trashed Obamacare in […]