Despite claiming to support abortion and reproductive freedom, corporations are donating millions of dollars to conservative groups that oppose abortion and support bans on the medical procedure.
As reported by Popular Information, in the last six years, corporations like Amazon, Walgreens and Google have made hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to anti-abortion political committees like the Republican Party’s leadership funds — the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) and the Republican Governors Asociation (RGA). Other corporations like Coca-Cola, CVS and Walmart have each given over a million dollars to such groups since 2016.
Together, Amazon, AT&T, Citigroup, Coca-Cola, Comcast, CVS, General Motors, Google, T-Mobile, Walgreens, Walmart, Wells Fargo and Verizon have spent at least $15.2 million to support anti-abortion politicians, according to publicly available political spending disclosures. This total doesn’t include donations made through private corporate lobbyists or support for right-wing nonprofits like the Heritage Foundation, as those donations don’t need to be disclosed under current campaign finance laws.
As the Supreme Court hinted it will soon do this week, right-wingers have been working to overturn Roe v. Wade for decades, and these companies have thus contributed to the erosion of reproductive rights.
For instance, in a 2017 report on “Women in the Economy,” Citigroup said that women are being held back by things like “restrictions on their reproductive rights,” and that the company wants to ensure “women are empowered to be free and equal participants in a robust, sustainable, and inclusive global economy.” As Popular Information finds, however, Citigroup has donated $685,000 to anti-abortion political groups since 2016.
AT&T also claims to support “gender equity and the empowerment of women,” according to its 2020 Diversity, Equity and Inclusion report, but has given at least $1.4 million to groups that oppose abortion. The company has also become one of the largest donors to conservative groups – it is one of the top donors to politicians who supported Texas’s abortion ban and is also the primary funder for far-right outlet One America News.
It’s important to recognize that, though people other than women can become pregnant, conservative anti-abortionists often don’t recognize this fact — and neither do many mainstream advocates of abortion rights. Thus, many corporations use trans-exclusive language to refer to abortion and reproductive rights as “women’s rights” even as they claim to be progressive. (In fact, attacks on body autonomy — such as bans on gender-affirming care or abortions — go hand-in-hand, often happening simultaneously.) At the same time, trans men and nonbinary people who can get pregnant also face gender-based discrimination that’s rooted in misogyny, patriarchy and heteropatriarchy at work and in their day-to-day lives.
Just as the news of the Supreme Court’s draft decision on overturning Roe was breaking this week, Amazon announced that it will be giving its non-contract workers reimbursements of up to $4,000 a year for travel expenses related to an abortion. Many of the company’s poorest and most vulnerable workers would be excluded from the benefit, but the company gained positive headlines from the announcement nonetheless.
Despite this new benefit, the company has donated to groups that are actively making it harder for its employees to get an abortion. The company has given nearly $1 million to anti-abortion groups, including nearly $780,000 to the RGA — a vital group as governors, with their veto power, can sometimes be the only person standing between a Republican-controlled legislature and the public’s reproductive rights.
While discussing economic issues in prepared remarks with reporters at the White House on Wednesday, President Joe Biden delved into other subject matters, including the Supreme Court’s draft opinion on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that was leaked earlier this week.
That draft opinion, written by conservative Justice Samuel Alito, stated that the Court was set to overturn abortion protections recognized in the 1973 ruling Roe v. Wade. Although such draft rulings do not necessarily reflect what the Court will eventually rule on any given issue, according to sources speaking with Politico, as of this week, five of the Court’s conservative bloc of justices (composing a majority of the Court overall) were prepared to back the ruling.
The official ruling of the Court is set to be released sometime in the next month or so.
Biden blasted that finding, expressing concern that other rights recognized by the Supreme Court over the past several decades could also be at risk of being dismantled, resulting in discrimination against several groups of people.
“This is about a lot more than abortion,” Biden said.
He added:
What happens if you have states change the law saying that children who are LGBTQ can’t be in classrooms with other children. Is that legit under the way the decision is written?
Biden’s concerns have been echoed by other lawmakers, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), who earlier this week also said LGBTQ protections — including marriage equality, an issue the Supreme Court decided on just seven years ago — could be at risk of being undone.
“As we’ve warned, SCOTUS isn’t just coming for abortion – they’re coming for the right to privacy Roe rests on, which includes gay marriage + civil rights,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted on Tuesday.
In addition to his commentaries on the economy and the Supreme Court, Biden also took aim at the Republican Party, disparaging them for continuing to allow former President Donald Trump to have a hold on them and determining the direction of the party.
“This MAGA crowd” — referencing Trump’s 2016 campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” — “is really the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history, in recent American history,” Biden said.
“Senator Rick Scott of Florida … released what he calls the ultra-MAGA agenda. It’s a MAGA agenda all right,” Biden derisively said. “Let me tell you about this ultra-MAGA agenda. It’s extreme, as most MAGA things are.”
He went on, stating that Republicans today were a “different breed of cat” from those he’s worked with in his nearly 50-year career in Washington, D.C.
“They’re not like what I served with for so many years,” the president said. “And the people who know better are afraid to act correctly, because they know they’ll be primaried.”
The Republican-controlled Oklahoma state legislature passed a bill on Thursday that is modeled after the six-week abortion ban that Texas implemented last fall, which allows private residents to sue abortion providers in order to enforce the ban.
Senate Bill 1503 would ban all abortions in Oklahoma after six weeks of pregnancy, so early on in the pregnancy that often people don’t even know yet that they’re pregnant.
Like Texas’s six-week abortion ban, the bill places the onus of enforcement on individuals rather than the state. In other words, the state wouldn’t force abortion providers to abide by the new rules — instead, it would incentivize private residents to enforce the rules by allowing them to sue medical providers or any other individual who helps someone get an abortion. If the bill is signed into law, residents would be able to sue such persons for $10,000 for every abortion performed.
Notably, the Oklahoma bill also restricts the defenses a person can make if they are being sued by another individual that claims they’re in violation of the law — a person cannot state in their defense, for example, a belief that the abortion ban is unconstitutional.
Proponents of the bill have referred to it as the “Oklahoma Heartbeat Act,” claiming that six weeks into pregnancy is when the fetal “heartbeat” becomes detectable. But medical experts say that such characterizations of what’s happening to the embryo at that stage of pregnancy are wrong.
“What we’re really detecting is a grouping of cells that are initiating some electrical activity. In no way is this detecting a functional cardiovascular system or a functional heart,” said Dr. Jennifer Kerns, an OB-GYN and associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco, in an interview with NPR last fall.
Earlier this month, Stitt signed a bill into law that would make the provision of abortion services at any stage a felony. But that law won’t go into effect right away, and will likely face fierce legal challenges once it does, unless the U.S. Supreme Court dismantles or curtails abortion rights protections that were established in the landmark 1973 ruling Roe v. Wade. The bill banning abortion after six weeks, however, will go into effect immediately after Stitt signs it.
Republican lawmakers in Ohio want to force doctors in the state to offer disproven drug “treatments” for COVID-19 to their patients, and to punish them financially if they refuse to do so.
House Bill 631, the COVID-19 Health Care Professional-Patient Relationship Protection Act, is sponsored by state Rep. Kris Jordan (R) and co-sponsored by state Rep. Ron Ferguson (R). The bill would require local boards of health to “promote and increase distribution” of four drugs to treat coronavirus — including hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, two drugs that it has been definitively proven do not work against the virus.
“This is securing that right for an individual to make, with consultation with their health care provider, the best decision for their health care plan,” Ferguson said of the bill. “More options, better health care. That’s what people are always looking for in the healthcare space.”
The bill comes after a Cincinnati hospital refused to treat a patient with ivermectin when he and his family requested it. When his wife sued following his death, the judge sided with the hospital, finding that the drug would have provided no value in helping save the man’s life.
According to the language of the bill, Ohio doctors would be required to promote the drugs as being “effective or deemed beneficial” for patients to use in the treatment of coronavirus. Doctors would also be forbidden from suppressing the promotion of the drugs, or limiting their patients’ access to them, and could be punished through lawsuits for doing so.
Numerous studies have debunked claims that either hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug, or ivermectin, a deworming medication typically used on farm animals, have any benefit in treating COVID-19.
In spite of these drugs having no positive effect in the treatment against or prevention of coronavirus, they have remained popular among far right groups who still refuse to get vaccinated, thanks in large part to disinformation from former President Donald Trump.
Republicans made eight attempts to breach voting systems in five states in search of evidence of a debunked conspiracy theory that voting machines flipped votes from former President Donald Trump to President Joe Biden, according to a Reuters investigation.
Trump allies targeted voting systems in Colorado, North Carolina, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. At least five of the breaches are under investigation by federal or local law enforcement. Four of the breaches forced officials to decertify or replace voting equipment due to security concerns. All of the attempts involved Republican officials or party activists who have pushed false claims about Trump’s election loss.
Four voting law experts told Reuters that the extent of the breaches is “unprecedented in modern U.S. elections.”
“You need to make sure that those ballots are maintained under strict chain of custody at all times,” David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, told the outlet. “It’s destroying voter confidence in the United States.”
Surveillance video obtained by Reuters shows Republican Elbert County, Colo. Clerk Dallas Schroeder attempting to copy hard drives containing sensitive voting data. He later testified that he received instructions from a pro-Trump conspiracy theorist to make a “forensic image of everything on the election server.”
Schroeder is under investigation for potentially violating election laws by Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who also sued him to try to force him to return the data. Schroeder is refusing to comply with the state and identify a lawyer who took the hard drives. His other attorney works with an activist backed by conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell, the founder of MyPillow.
Lindell is funding numerous groups involved in the years-long effort to try to find evidence of their bogus conspiracy theory. Lindell told Reuters he hired four members of the U.S. Integrity Plan (USEIP), a pro-Trump group that allegedly sent armed members door-to-door to investigate fraud claims in Colorado. He claimed he has spent about $30 million in total and hired 70 people in the failed effort.
“We’ve got to get rid of the machines!” Lindell told the outlet. “We need to melt them down and use them for prison bars and put everyone in prison that was involved with them.”
The breaches appear to have been inspired by the false belief that voting system upgrades or maintenance required by the state would delete evidence of their fraud conspiracy theory. Election officials told Reuters that such updates have no impact on the preservation of past data.
But such breaches could violate voter privacy and underscore growing concerns of potential “insider threats,” officials told the outlet. Griswold’s office told Reuters that the data accessed by Schroeder likely included ballot images that showed how people cast their ballots.
In another Colorado incident, Lindell ally Tina Peters, the Mesa County clerk, allowed an unauthorized person to copy a “forensic image” of a voting system hard drive before sensitive passwords to access the voting system were published on right-wing conspiracy sites. Peters, who was indicted on 10 criminal counts over the breach, baselessly accused the voting machine company Dominion and Griswold of a conspiracy to destroy evidence of election-rigging.
Trump allies like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell repeatedly pushed baseless claims that Dominion, in an extensive conspiracy involving China, billionaire financier George Soros, and late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, rigged the election against Trump. Dominion and Smartmatic, another voting equipment company that got dragged into the conspiracy theory despite having no ties to Dominion, have filed multi-billion-dollar defamation lawsuits against Giuliani, Powell and Lindell, among others.
Dominion told Reuters that the conspiracy theories “have been repeatedly debunked, including by bipartisan government officials.”
It’s unclear whether any data was accessed in another apparent breach in Michigan’s Adams Township, where the key component of a ballot counting machine went missing for four days last fall before it was found at the office of a clerk who posted QAnon memes on social media. The clerk, Stephanie Scott, was stripped of her duties in October by Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson after refusing to perform legally-required maintenance. She later sued Benson in February, alleging that she was unconstitutionally punished.
In another incident in Cross Village, Michigan, a woman named Tera Jackson impersonated an official from the non-existent “Election Integrity Commission” to gain access to the town’s ballot-counting machine last January and tried to clone it. She ultimately pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge in exchange for prosecutors dropping charges of fraud and illegal access. Three men that she worked with, including a former law enforcement officer who showed up with a bulletproof vest and a gun, gained access to a vote tabulator but don’t appear to have been able to clone the drive. The men were not charged because prosecutors said they believed they were misled by Jackson.
The most recent breach was in March in North Carolina, where Surrey County GOP Chair William Keith Senter threatened to have elections director Michella Huff fired if she did not give him access to a vote-counting machine. Senter and conspiracy theorist Douglas Frank met Huff in March to claim that a “chip” inside the machine was used to rig the election. The state election board reported the threats against Huff to law enforcement.
“I’m very concerned for the voters,” Huff told Reuters. “Democracy starts here. It starts here in our office.”
After the Colorado breaches, Lindell hired four USEIP members to head Cause for America, a right-wing network of election conspiracists. The group has continued to search for evidence of fraud despite coming up empty since 2020.
“I have over probably 50 to 70 people that I pay, that all they’re doing is on this election,” Lindell told Reuters. “I guess Cause of America would be a little piece of that.”
Griswold accused the election conspiracists of seeking to suppress opposing voters.
“These threats are being fueled by extreme elected officials and political insiders who are spreading the Big Lie,” she told Reuters, “to further suppress the vote, destabilize American elections, and undermine voter confidence.”
Just after news broke of President Joe Biden’s plan to fulfill his campaign promise to cancel student debt, Republicans introduced a bill that would explicitly bar him from doing so, despite evidence that the current towering burden of student debt constitutes a major economic crisis.
GOP Senators Bill Cassidy (Louisiana), John Thune (South Dakota), Richard Burr (North Carolina), and two others unveiled a measure that would bar the president from canceling student debt because of a national emergency, and limit the president’s ability to extend a student debt payment pause.
Their proposal, which is not likely to pass Congress, would also cap any future payment pauses for borrowers with a salary over four times the federal poverty line — or a mere $54,360 for single adults with no children. This is less than the average starting salary for college graduates from the class of 2020, which was $55,260.
The bill comes just after a potential breakthrough on the issue of student debt. Biden told House lawmakers in a meeting on Tuesday that he’s considering canceling a substantial amount of student debt after Democrats and debt activists have begged him for months to do so.
Roughly 43 million borrowers owe $1.9 trillion in student debt, according to the Student Debt Crisis Center. Debtors are often crushed by the weight of the debt, both financially and mentally; some owe triple or quadruple their original loan amount, and are burdened by the feeling or reality that the debt will never be repaid.
Debtors also face “hidden” costs due to their loans, with higher interest rates on things like home and car loans and credit cards. Canceling student debt could result in wide-reaching positive effects on the economy, boosting borrowers’ ability to buy a home or start a business.
Meanwhile, the student loan payment pause, which was originally put into effect by Donald Trump during the onset of the pandemic, has saved borrowers about $200 billion over the course of two years.
The Republicans argue that student loan cancellation and the payment freeze are a “handout” to wealthy college graduates and those who may have taken on loans for them, parroting a right-wing argument that the people who would benefit most from loan forgiveness are already wealthy and don’t need the money.
These arguments are based on false premises, however. People who take on student loans typically come from families without generational wealth that could cover the cost of tuition in the first place, and research has found that student loan forgiveness is progressive, meaning that it would provide the biggest benefits to the least wealthy debtors. The higher the loan amount that is canceled, the more progressive the benefit, the Roosevelt Institute found last year.
The report also found that cancellation would be crucial to closing the racial wealth gap, providing aid to Black and Latinx borrowers who suffer the most from student loan debt.
In their press release on the bill, the senators also say that the payment pause costs taxpayers $5 billion a month, citing Education Department data that shows $5 billion a month as the amount that borrowers save as a result of the pause extension. However, that’s an oversimplification of how federal student loans work and a flattening of the reason that the government gives student loans to begin with.
It also suggests that student loans should be a method of raising money for the government, a notion that even Trump has said is needlessly cruel. “That’s probably one of the only things the government shouldn’t make money off — I think it’s terrible that one of the only profit centers we have is student loans,” Trump said in 2015.
Student loans are given out with the purpose of making it easier for students to afford college tuition, which is rising at astounding rates. It’s in the government’s best interest to make higher education more accessible, as this can help strengthen democratic participation in society and stave off fascism.
To give loans, the government borrows money, adding to the deficit temporarily until the loans are paid back; the government sometimes collects a very limited profit from the loans due to interest. While it’s true that student loan cancellation may affect the deficit, a 2018 study by economic scholars found that the benefits of cancellation would be vast — not only for borrowers, but for the entire economy.
According to the study, a one-time mass cancellation of student debt would provide an immediate boost to the GDP and would generate up to $1.1 trillion in 2016 dollars in GDP over a decade. The policy would create jobs, reduce unemployment, and have a stimulus effect that would offset some of the cost of the program, with only a moderate negative effect on the deficit and inflation.
Insiders within both of the two major U.S. political parties have expressed concern that billionaire Elon Musk’s recent purchase of Twitter could potentially result in former President Donald Trump being allowed back on the platform.
Trump was banned from the site more than a year ago for spewing incendiary rhetoric regarding the attack on the U.S. Capitol building by a mob of his loyalists on January 6, 2021. Although Musk has not yet stated whether he would lift Trump’s ban from the site, comments he made after his $44 billion purchase of Twitter on Monday seem to indicate that he will move in that direction.
Both Democrats and Republicans are worried that Musk’s purchase of the site could mean Trump’s return. According to reporting from CNBC, officials in the Biden White House are “closely watching the deal,” and fear that Trump’s potential Twitter comeback might result in an increase in disinformation, as the former president frequently used the platform to promote lies back when he was allowed on the site.
“Trump will use Twitter to do far more damage to regain power in 2022 and 2024 while Elon Musk has given no indication that he will do anything to stop him,” Mary Anne Marsh, a veteran Democratic strategist, said to CNBC.
Republicans appear to be similarly concerned about the possibility of Trump returning to Twitter. According to a report from Politico, “no one is more petrified” about the potential return of the former president to the platform “than members of Trump’s own party.”
In a series of calls Politico reporters made on Monday night to Republican insiders, not a single one spoke positively about the possibility that Trump would be allowed to return to the platform.”Every single one of them told us that they hoped the former president stays the hell away from Twitter,” the news agency reported.
Allowing Trump to resume his erratic tweeting would not work to their advantage, Republicans have said.
“If I’m a Democrat, I’d pray that Elon Musk puts Trump right back on Twitter,” one GOP House leadership aide told Politico. A Trump return to the site is “enough to create headaches — and it’s enough to probably cost us a couple seats,” that aide added.
Trump has claimed that he won’t return to Twitter, as he is instead focused on promoting his own social media site, Truth Social. “I want everybody to come over to TRUTH — conservatives, liberals, whatever,” Trump said in a Fox News interview this week.
“The lure of Twitter … may prove as irresistible for Trump,” GOP strategist Doug Heye said to Politico, adding that there’s “no faster way for Trump to be front and center [in] the political conversation than rejoining Twitter, and he knows that.”
Donald Trump may not pay his debts, but the man vying to replace him as standard-bearer for Republican grievance politics apparently does.
Last week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has received close to $500,000 in campaign contributions from the family of Betsy DeVos over the last four years, returned the favor, appearing on a “tele-townhall” with Trump’s former education secretary to promote her campaign to privatize Michigan’s public schools.
Just days after DeSantis made national headlines by seeking to punish the Walt Disney Company for opposing his “Don’t Say Gay” law and rejecting dozens of K-12 textbooks on fictitious ideological grounds, DeVos opened their conversation by telling viewers, “With your signature on the Let Michigan Kids Learn petition, we can bring some of that Florida success here to Michigan.”
Since late last year, DeVos has been pushing a petition drive for a ballot initiative, “Let MI Kids Learn,” which critics have described as a thinly-veiled effort to enact a school voucher system in Michigan through “an end-run around the normal legislative process,” as State Sen. Erika Geiss, chair of the Senate Democratic Caucus, told Salon earlier this month.
Technically speaking, Let MI Kids Learn would establish hefty tax credits for companies and individuals who donate to a pass-through organization that provides scholarships for children to support “school choice,” thus circumventing Michigan’s strict constitutional prohibition on state funding of private schools. Also technically speaking, the Let MI Kids Learn campaign is gathering signatures to place the proposal on the ballot in Michigan this November. In fact, it’s unlikely that will ever happen.
Democrats say that this petition is just the latest in a series of school voucher proposals that Michigan voters have overwhelmingly rejected — including a failed 2000 voucher push funded with about $5 million from the DeVos family — and point out that if enough signatures are gathered, neither the voters nor Gov. Gretchen Whitmer will even get the chance to weigh in.
That’s because Let MI Kids Learn is being advanced by Republicans specifically to exploit a peculiar loophole in Michigan law that allows citizen petitions that meet a certain threshold of signatures to go directly before the state legislature, which can then pass them with a simple majority that is not subject to the governor’s veto. As Salonreported this April, Michigan Republicans are currently at work on signature drives for four such “ballot initiatives” — including two related to DeVos’ voucher scheme, another to restrict the state’s public health powers and one more to curtail voting rights — that they hope to pass through this unusual process.
This spring, a reported shortfall in signatures for the initiatives led DeVos’ Let MI Kids Learn team to make an unusual alliance with far-right activists to try to meet the petition quota. Now it appears that DeVos is hoping that DeSantis’ star power might help boost her campaign.
At the Wednesday night tele-townhall event, DeSantis and DeVos spoke alongside Amy Hawkins, a staffer at Let MI Kids Learn and also a publicist whose consulting firm, Generation Strategies, has worked with numerous right-wing groups, from advocacy organizations like Citizens for Traditional Values to the influential conservative Hillsdale College to charismatic Christian right leaders like Lance Wallnau and Lou Engle. In 2020, Hawkins launched a now-defunct website, VictimsofWhitmer.com, to support the Unlock Michigan campaign, which sought to strip the governor of her ability to issue emergency public health rules. This year, a follow-up campaign, Unlock Michigan 2, is also using the petition process in hopes of limiting the ability of other state bodies to address public health crises as well.
On the call, DeSantis and DeVos suggested that conservatives have a unique window to radically alter public education in America.
“I think there’s never been a better time to raise these issues with the general public because what you saw over the last two years is millions and millions of students throughout the United States denied opportunity to even go to school in person at all,” DeSantis said. “And that was almost entirely because of the power wielded by these entrenched special interest groups like the teachers union.”
The Sunshine State governor went on to say that these “special interests” “should not be in charge of our kids’ education,” and that parents should “[make] sure that power is taken away from those who have proven that they cannot be trusted to wield it.”
DeVos agreed, calling this moment “an absolutely prime and perfect time” to push for changes in education. “I’ve often cited Florida as a really prime example of continuing to push forward to give families more and more power and more and more choices over their kids’ education and futures,” she said. “And we can emulate what Florida has done to a large extent and go even further by making sure the Let Michigan Kids Learn initiative is successful.”
DeVos has sought for years to find ways to redirect taxpayer money from public schools to private and religious institutions. In 2001, she famously called on fellow wealthy Christian activists to embrace “school choice” as a more efficient means of advancing “God’s kingdom” than simply funding private Christian schools. In Michigan, she used her influence to advocate for the expansion of for-profit charter schools in Detroit, which resulted in increased segregation and massive corruption, as millions of dollars were channeled to charters that never opened.
In early 2020, as Trump’s secretary of education, DeVos directed COVID-19 relief funding toward private schools. After a 2020 Supreme Court decision, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, which mandated that states that allow public funding of private schools must also include religious schools in those programs, she urged other states to quickly pass more “school choice” to allow more students “the freedom to pursue faith-based education.”
Although DeVos and her supporters claim that Let MI Kids Learn would give parents $8,000 per child to spend on education as they see fit — from buying laptops to paying for tutoring or school tuition — in reality, only families with kids in private schools would see anything close to that level of support. While private school families might be eligible for $7,800 in funding, those with children in public schools could only receive a maximum benefit of $500. Democrats also estimate that, over five years, Let MI Kids Learn would drain $1 billion from the state’s pools of public school funding.
Sam Inglot, deputy director of the liberal advocacy group Progress Michigan, part of a counter-campaign called “For MI Kids, For Our Schools,” described the townhall conversation as whitewashing the catastrophic effect DeVos’ plan would have on both public school and general public services budgets in the state.
“This has been DeVos’ MO for decades,” said Inglot. “And now it’s happening alongside a lot of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and attacks on honesty in education and accurately teaching the history of America.”
Not only is this “backdoor voucher scheme” insidious, Inglot continued, but so is the process by which DeVos, and the Michigan legislators she has funded for years, are pushing the initiative. “This is legislation that went through the normal checks and balances of government and was vetoed,” he said. “Essentially what they’re trying to do is buy a piece of legislation.” They are also, he said, trying to circumvent the will of the public. “If the organizers [of Let MI Kids Learn] have their way, the people of Michigan will never have a chance to vote on this.”
Over the last year, many Republican politicians and advocates have grown surprisingly forthcoming about the long-term goals of the educational culture wars they promote. In 2021, Florida Commissioner of Education Richard Corcoran declared that Republicans would win the political “war” in education, while sketching out a plan to lure so many students out of public schools that the damage to the system would be permanent. This month, Chris Rufo, the Manhattan Institute fellow who turned “critical race theory” into an amazingly effective political scapegoat, bluntly explained that “to get universal school choice you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.”
State Sen. Dayna Polehanki, the Democratic minority vice-chair of Michigan’s Senate Education and Career Readiness Committee, said that after the difficult time many parents had during the pandemic, “DeVos sees an opportunity here… She smells blood in the water.”
Polehanki also warned that the Let MI Kids Learn initiative is being pushed by paid petition circulators who aren’t legally required to accurately describe the measures they’re promoting. Some have lied, claiming the measure would “help special-ed kids in Michigan.”
“That’s absolutely legal and it’s absolutely what they might do,” she continued. “But what you’re really signing is one of a long line of attempts by Betsy DeVos and her GOP mega-donors to flout the Michigan Constitution.”
Earlier this month, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed into law House Bill 322, colloquially dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, restricting public school teachers from discussing LGBTQ+ history or people in public elementary schools.
It stood out for two reasons: Alabama was just the second state to pass such a law in 21 years, after Florida passed a similar measure in March. But more significantly, Ivey had just signed a repeal of a similar law the previous year.
At least 20 states have introduced “Don’t Say Gay” laws this year, which have made waves around the country. But in a handful of states, versions of the legislation have existed for decades.
Since 1992, Alabama’s education code stipulated that teachers emphasize “in a factual manner and from a public health perspective, that homosexuality is not a lifestyle acceptable to the general public and that homosexual conduct is a criminal offense under the laws of the state.”
Ivey did not issue public statements when she signed the repeal, which was first passed by the legislature, but her signature seemed in step with the times. A year ago, “Don’t Say Gay” laws that had passed in the 1980s were considered archaic, LGBTQ+ advocates said, with many of them repealed over the years. After marriage equality became the law of the land in 2015, seven states passed laws mandating that curriculums include LGBTQ+ history and life.
Republican lawmakers say the new spate of curriculum bills allow parents to decide what their children learn about sexuality at a young age; Florida’s new law bars discussions of sexual orientation or gender identity until after third grade, at which point parents must be notified if their kids might learn about LGBTQ+ issues. But this year, as 15 states now have anti-trans sports bans on the books, LGBTQ+ advocates say Republican lawmakers are aiming to one-up each other for political gain.
“Republicans have to put a conservative point on the board, notch their anti-LGBT credentials, and say, ‘Look, I really campaigned on this.’ Or, ‘I really went to the mat for this anti-LGBT policy,’” said Adam Polaski, communications director for the Campaign for Southern Equality. “Unfortunately, opponents of LGBT equality have often taken their fight to the schools.”
Texas lawmakers have expressed interest in pursuing a “Don’t Say Gay” bill like Florida’s and Alabama’s, even though the state has had a similar regulation on the books since 1991. In Texas, the state code still stipulates that educational materials for people under the age of 18 “state that homosexual conduct is not an acceptable lifestyle and is a criminal offense.”
According to the Movement Advancement Project (MAP), which tracks LGBTQ+ policy throughout the country, 19 percent of the country lives in a state with an LGBTQ+ curriculum ban. Most are in states with laws that predate Florida’s and Alabama’s. Still, most Americans are largely unaware of the fact that Florida is not the first state to pass such a law, advocates said.
Oklahoma passed the nation’s first bill banning teachers from talking about homosexuality in an AIDS sex ed measure in April 1987, and Louisiana followed suit that July. South Carolina passed a “Don’t Say Gay” bill in 1988. Texas and Arizona passed their own in 1991. In total, nine states passed laws banning schools from teaching about “homosexuality” from 1987 to 2001, when Utah adopted its version.
Many of those were written into sex ed codes. For example, Louisiana still has a law on the books that states, “No sex education course offered in the public schools of the state shall utilize any sexually explicit materials depicting male or female homosexual activity.”
However, that is not the case in every state, said Logan Casey, senior policy researcher and adviser for the MAP.
“Many of these laws are written intentionally vaguely so that they can be applied even more broadly than the explicit letter of the law might suggest,” Casey said of the laws written up until 2001.
Mississippi sex ed law requires that teachers simply teach current state law related to sexual conduct and lists “homosexuality” alongside sensitive topics such as “forcible rape, statutory rape, paternity establishment” and “child support.” Mississippi state law does not protect LGBTQ+ people from discrimination.
Casey said the bills are relics of the AIDS crisis, when panic about homosexuality dictated school curriculum. It also dates back to the infamous “Save Our Children” campaign led by activist Anita Bryant in the 1970s to overturn anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ people in Miami, Florida.
“Once the HIV epidemic came into the picture, then a bunch of states started considering and enacting laws that banned instruction on sexuality and homosexuality in public education, channeling this ‘Save Our Children’ campaign energy and the fear and prejudice during the HIV epidemic,” Casey said.
Five states repealed their “Don’t Say Gay” bills between 2006 and 2021, when Alabama rescinded its law.
Those familiar with the old curriculum laws expressed surprise that Florida’s latest bill has sent shockwaves across the nation. Advocates say part of that surprise is that “Don’t Say Gay” statutes have been revived after two decades. They also add that local groups have gotten smarter about fighting the measures.
Vivian Topping, director of advocacy and civic engagement of the Equality Federation, a coalition of state LGBTQ+ organizations, said local Florida organizers worked overtime to sound the alarms about their “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
“They created TV ads and really brought together national partners to make a big splash out of what was happening in Florida,” she said in a statement.
Advocates say that the current push for “Don’t Say Gay” bills is political. Nadine Smith, executive director of Equality Florida, has claimed that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ decision to push the “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida is less about kids and more about the Republican’s presidential ambitions.
“DeSantis has damaged our state’s reputation as a welcoming and inclusive place for all families, he has made us a laughing stock and target of national derision,” Smith said in a statement. “Worse, he has made schools less safe for children.”
DeSantis has argued that his bill allows parents to decide what their kids learn.
“Parents’ rights have been increasingly under assault around the nation, but in Florida we stand up for the rights of parents and the fundamental role they play in the education of their children,” said DeSantis in a statement.
Amid controversy surrounding Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s personal ties to the January 6 attack on the Capitol, new polling finds that the vast majority of likely voters support implementing a stronger code of ethics for the High Court.
When asked whether or not they agreed that Supreme Court justices should be subject to a code of ethics requiring them to recuse themselves from any case relating to personal financial or family matters, 81 percent of 1,177 respondents agreed, new polling by Data for Progress finds. Only 10 percent of respondents were opposed to the proposal, giving the supporters a 71-point margin.
Support held strong across political affiliations. Democrats were the most supportive of the code of ethics, with 84 percent in favor. An overwhelming majority of independents and Republicans also agreed with the idea, with 82 percent and 77 percent of respondents saying as such, respectively.
The polling comes as Democratic and progressive lawmakers and government watchdog groups are calling for Thomas to recuse himself from cases related to the 2020 election and Donald Trump’s coup attempt on January 6th, 2021. Last month, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) called for Thomas to recuse himself from such cases and to disclose his family’s income gathered from far right organizations — or, better yet, to resign, she said.
These calls were sparked by recent revelations that Thomas’s wife, conservative activist Ginni Thomas, was deeply involved in efforts to keep Trump in the White House after the former president’s loss to Joe Biden. In leaked texts between Ginni Thomas and Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, she appeared to be using her close ties with federal officials in order to push them to overturn the election results.
Thomas’s financial ties to the right wing have also come into question. In 2011, government watchdog group Common Cause discovered that Clarence Thomas had failed to report that, over the course of 2003 to 2007, Ginni Thomas had received $680,000 from the Koch-funded Heritage Foundation. Clarence Thomas later amended his financial statements to reflect that information.
The existing code of conduct for members of the Supreme Court requires justices to recuse themselves from cases that may relate to their personal finances, but doesn’t specifically bar them from cases that they have personal ties to, outside of financial issues.
Legal ethics experts say that Thomas’s personal ties make enough of a case for him to recuse himself from all 2020 election-related cases. Voters agree with this; polling from earlier this month found that 53 percent of voters think that Thomas shouldn’t participate in cases involving his wife. The same poll, by Politico/Morning Consult, found that only 28 percent of Americans approve of Thomas.
The issue with Thomas’s participation in 2020 election-related cases is not only the rulings themselves, experts say, but also that it may shake the public’s trust in the Court overall.
The public view of the Supreme Court in general has been eroding as conservatives have manipulated the Court in their favor. A poll last year found that less than 50 percent of Americans approve of the Supreme Court’s performance, the lowest approval rating in five years.
A Michigan state lawmaker’s speech is going viral for condemning bigoted remarks from her Republican colleague and for defending those who are trying to protect LGBTQ students’ rights and preserve lessons on racism in public school classrooms.
Speaking in the Michigan legislature on Tuesday, State Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D) said she was not expecting to see a fundraising email earlier this week from fellow state Sen. Lana Theis (R) accusing her of “grooming” and “sexualizing” children. Those terms have become more and more common among far right politicians and pundits, who are using them to legitimize, at least among their base, the elimination of protections for LGBTQ children throughout the country.
McMorrow also noted that the fundraising email accused her of supporting lessons that supposedly make children feel bad for being white — another common talking point among those pushing for bans on critical race theory and other lessons on racism in public school classrooms.
The fundraising email from Theis, which included extremely derogatory language against LGBTQ people, accused Democrats, including McMorrow, of walking out of an invocation prayer she had given earlier this month. Theis claimed that the prayer, conducted on the state Senate floor, was to ask God to “protect” children who were “under attack.” Given her staunch opposition to protections for LGBTQ students and her statements opposing educators who teach about racism in classrooms, it was clear that her prayer was a politically-loaded attack rather than a true call for unity.
The accusations from Theis against McMorrow and others were not only wrong but deeply offensive, the Democratic lawmaker said.
“I sat on it for a while wondering, ‘Why me?’ And then I realized — I am the biggest threat to your hollow, hateful scheme,” McMorrow said in her speech, directing her comments toward Theis. “You can’t claim that you are targeting marginalized kids in the name of ‘parental rights’ if another parent is standing up to say ‘no.’”
Instead, McMorrow pointed out, Republicans who issue such lines of attack “dehumanize and marginalize” those who are trying to protect LGBTQ students.
Senator Lana Theis accused me by name of grooming and sexualizing children in an attempt to marginalize me for standing up against her marginalizing the LGBTQ community…in a fundraising email, for herself.
McMorrow also addressed Theis’s accusations that she had supposedly pushed for lessons that make white kids feel bad. In her fundraising email, Theis accused McMorrow of embracing lessons that tell “8-year-olds [they] are responsible for slavery.”
“I am a straight, white, Christian, married suburban mom, who knows that the very notion that learning about slavery or redlining or systemic racism somehow means that ‘children are being taught to feel bad and hate themselves because they are white’ is absolute nonsense,” McMorrow said, quoting a part of Theis’s email. She added:
No child alive today is responsible for slavery. No one in this room is responsible for slavery. But each and every single one of us bears responsibility for writing the next chapter of history … We are not responsible for the past. We also cannot change the past. We can’t pretend that it didn’t happen, or deny people their very right to exist.
McMorrow denounced Theis for her “performative” attacks against her and others, and accused the lawmaker of using her Christian faith as “a shield to target and marginalize already marginalized people.”
“I want every child in this state to feel seen, heard and supported, not marginalized and not targeted because they are not straight, white and Christian,” McMorrow said. “We cannot let hateful people tell you otherwise to scapegoat and deflect from the fact that they are not doing anything to fix the real issues that impact people’s lives.”
“I hope [the fundraising email] brought in a few dollars,” McMorrow added sarcastically, directing her comments at Theis. “I hope it made you sleep good last night.”
When it comes to electoral predictions, there is no there there, in this wild moment. Once-reliable polling outfits are looking at their suddenly inaccurate data the way NASA scientists watched Atlas rockets go corkscrewing off the launch pad in the early days of the Mercury program.
All I know for certain is this: Any time period that can produce an accurate news sentence like this — “Michael Avenatti, the lawyer who pressured former President Donald Trump to pay a settlement to a stripper, was sentenced to 30 months in prison yesterday for trying to extort millions of dollars from sportswear company Nike Inc.” — is not a time frame I’m comfortable guessing about. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you something — probably a subscription to a polling page. For the present, my election-year yard sign reads, “Meteor 2024: Because That Rhymes.”
Yet there is a cold sense of dread blowing softly through the chambers of my soul, and the chill is something that cannot be safely ignored. I am hard-pressed to recall a time when so many divergent yet implacably dangerous forces have coalesced in such menacing fashion, and it seems that few are prepared to acknowledge it, much less move to thwart it. Some of the perils we face are open-ended, with no clear demarcation between “Hurry up!” and “Too late.” This is not one of those: I can tell you the exact day the deal I fear will go down, if it does go down at all.
So, for emphasis: This is not what I think will happen. This is what I’m terrified could happen, one possibility in an infinite universe. To no small degree, it is already happening.
A political snapshot of the present moment shows a president with approval ratings lower than snake snot. A grumpy, unsettled electorate looking to lay blame for their lost two years has in Joe Biden a convenient target. Inflation, gas prices, supply shortages and the still-muddied economic waters of the COVID era have constantly disrupted the administration’s best legislative efforts, with the help of a coal baron senator whose party designation is as meaningful as a diamond made of glue. Thanks in no small part to this White House’s bizarre disinterest in promoting its positive and popular policy achievements, it is entirely probable these conditions will continue to linger until November.
Meanwhile, war crimes committed in Ukraine by Vladimir Putin’s Russian military forces are the daily fare of the news networks. While most agree that the U.S. cannot directly challenge another nuclear power on the battlefield, the anguish unfolding before us has left many urging more “action,” whatever that means in this devastating context.
As with the Afghanistan withdrawal, Biden’s stance is one of grim necessity that has no satisfying answer; there will be suffering no matter what, and that suffering will wear on voters the longer the war drags on. Like as not, Ukraine will be a major issue come November.
The Democratic House and Senate majorities dangle by a thread. Senators Jon Tester in Montana, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, Debbie Stabenow in Michigan and Jackie Rosen in Nevada among others face razor-close races.
In the House, prospects for the Democrats to salvage their own majority are equally grim. Republicans in both chambers, meanwhile, have all but abandoned the idea of an agenda, and instead are “flooding the zone” with incendiary and harmful nonsense about pedophiles, immigration, “CRT,” the “rigged” 2020 election and whatever else they can fling in order to “win” the news day.
Example: Instead of debating the reinstatement of the enormously helpful child tax credit, which lapsed recently because of Republicans, the most pointed current discussions center on whether godless socialist teachers are instructing students to use litter boxes in the restroom in the event they identify as cats. How did that patently false rumor get going? Republicans. Once again, they are massaging bizarre conspiracy fears to motivate an already-motivated voter base, and to roil the discussion for everyone else. This train is never late.
All of the above, at present, is fact, and it doesn’t take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Circumstances could change overnight, of course, but it is also those very intangibles I fear most.
A Florida judge just blew up the mask mandate for airlines and most public transportation, just as the COVID subvariant of omicron, the “stealth variant” BA.2, becomes the dominant strain in the U.S. Almost 42,000 people were newly infected yesterday, a two-week uptick of 42 percent. That upward trend has been on the move for weeks now, and is growing. While there is no certainty that BA.2 could cause another sharp infection spike, we have seen this particular moment a couple of times already, and furthermore seen the horrors that came after.
If BA.2 decides to spread its wings like its cousins have before, the outbreak could last for months — and who knows what the COVID outlook will be on Election Day. A population once again asked to wear masks and avoid public gatherings after more than two years of pain and sacrifice, a population forced to endure skyrocketing prices and the shame of a war they can’t stop, might be a loose cannon at the polls. While there will be no predicting that outcome, Democrats could stand to lose both chambers if such challenging circumstances prevail.
At which point, we enter a realm of question marks. Will Biden, stymied for two years after losing the House and Senate, actually run again in 2024? If he does, can he win? If he doesn’t, can the Democrats make a switch-horses-in-midstream argument the electorate can accept? Will the economy or COVID be any better, or will our current elongated crises have taken on the stink of the inevitable and the eternal?
Final question: Will Donald Trump run again in 2024? He has not yet come straight out and said so, but all available signs point to “yes.” If he does announce his candidacy, his still-towering popularity with the GOP base could clear the field of contenders. He received more than 74 million votes in 2020, an astonishing haul for the guy who lost, and he sits today upon a campaign war chest of astonishing size.
The possibility of Trump not running doesn’t mean we can breathe easy, either. Whoever takes the Republican nomination in 2024 is likely to be a creature of Trumpist fascism, perhaps without all the hideous personal flaws of Trump himself. If you thought nobody could be more dangerous than Trump, think again.
None of this is certain by any stretch, but all of it is why I don’t sleep much anymore. If you have some ideas on how to head this potential cataclysm off its path, I invite you to get started immediately. It’s never too late, until it is.
As 2022’s primaries approach, an unprecedented wave of public and private efforts are underway to foster trust in election operations and election officials in response to ongoing claims by Donald Trump and his supporters, including many officeholders and candidates, that President Joe Biden was not legitimately elected.
Public-facing efforts include creating an election official appreciation day on April 12, a newly launched Election Official Legal Defense Network to counter new Republican-drafted laws that criminalize mistakes in administering elections, and federal lobbying to protect election officials and their families from threats. There also are behind-the-scenes efforts to educate local civic, business and faith leaders so that trusted voices can help to respond to election deniers.
The efforts come as scores of candidates for statewide and local office, including many seeking reelection, have made the unproven claim that Trump’s second term was stolen a key feature of their 2022 campaigns, and, as a supermajority of Republicans — a figure unchanged since late 2020 — still believe that Democrats and election insiders stole the presidential election.
“You can’t have 30 percent of the county not believing in elections,” said Benjamin Ginsberg, a veteran Republican Party election lawyer who has spoken out against the “big lie” — Trump’s assertion of victory — and a co-chair of the Election Official Legal Defense Network.
“Where we are really lacking is how we talk to that 30 percent,” he continued, speaking on a March 28 podcast with Sarah Longwell, publisher of the Bulwark, a media outlet featuring Republicans who reject the big lie. “There is a dialog that really has to take place about the election system and how reliable it in fact is… That’s an important conversation that we’re trying to figure out how to have, but haven’t really succeeded yet.”
The comments by Ginsberg, who said he has “spent 30 years doing Election Day operations for Republican Party committees and candidates” and “never” found evidence of Democrats or an election official who rigged the results, underscore both the challenge and, so far, the limited impact of trying to convince Trump’s base that elections are trustworthy and 2020’s results were accurate.
Nonetheless, the efforts to instill confidence and build new guardrails is a departure from more traditional election protection work, where teams of lawyers help voters cast their ballots and sometimes sue to ensure their votes are counted. Those efforts, led nationally by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, usually focus on the fall’s general elections and not the earlier primaries. Yet the primaries tend to draw the most partisan candidates and voters.
2022’s primaries feature an unprecedented number of candidates who deny that Biden won and who cite an array of doubts and conspiracies to press their case.
“As of April 4, 2022, in two out of three governor and secretary of state contests, there is an Election Denier running. This is true for one out of three attorney general contests as well,” reported States United Action, a group supporting inclusive and accurate elections, in an update to a March report that detailed how the post-2020 trend of pro-Trump Republicans pushing for more restrictive voting laws has evolved into candidates who deny Biden won, spread conspiracies about the election, and attack election officials and voting systems.
“Replacing the refs — the people who administer our elections — is a key pillar of the anti-democracy playbook. Voters across the political spectrum should be paying attention to who these Election Deniers are, where they are running, and the seriousness of their false claims about the 2020 election results,” said Thania Sanchez, senior vice president of research and policy development at States United Action.
What remains to be seen is how 2022’s candidates and their base will react — in words and actions — if they lose in the primaries, as many of them will because some of them are seeking their party’s nomination for the same office. And, moreover, what would or should be done if Election Day and vote-verifying steps that follow are intentionally disrupted or contested by conspiratorial assertions that hidden hands have tampered with the results.
Election officials, some of whom were threatened by right-wingers in recent months, have been steeling themselves for 2022’s elections and preparing to respond to emotion-laden threats.
“Not only are our elections technically more complex, [but] we are expected to know a lot of things that… wouldn’t be typical of a public servant,” Natalie Adona, Nevada County, California, assistant clerk-recorder, told a national organizing call for April 12’s Thank Election Heroes day organized by Public Citizen, one of many groups supporting the effort.
“I had to learn all that I can about de-escalation — and it’s something that I would normally depend on the police to offer,” Adona said. “Our workers, who I train to serve at our vote centers, are increasingly being confronted by more and more aggressive people. I, myself, have been confronted by people who have threatened me.”
Challenges Are Clear, Answers Are Not
There have been numerous webinars and reports from organizations that work with current and former election officials seeking to counter Trump-led disinformation. These efforts, which usually feature civil service professionals who are highly regarded for their election work, reveal a deepening understanding of the election deniers in their midst. But acquiring a new understanding of their critics and adversaries is not the same thing as changing their minds.
At the National Association of State Election Directors’ semi-annual meeting in early March, one session open to the press featured Colorado’s Judd Choate, who recounted how his office had surveyed voters last summer and identified some contradictory beliefs. Many voters distrusted 2020’s national results but had confidence in local elections. Choate said his state’s response was “not so much countering misinformation but getting good information out.”
An April 6 report and briefing on neutralizing partisan impulses among election officials from the Washington-based Bipartisan Policy Center and Election Reformers Network differentiated between which election officials and workers were more and less likely to be partisan, which may be an index of who can best attest to the reliability and accuracy of elections.
Kevin Johnson, Election Reformers Network executive director, noted that the U.S. was unique among democracies because (as Business Insider’s Grace Panettapointed out) about 60 percent of the approximately 8,000 state and local election administrators across the country had “pretty substantial ties to political parties.”
These officials, who run for office or are appointed, include secretaries of state, many county or municipal officials, canvass boards (which assess voter intent on ambiguously marked ballots and other documents) and partisan observers appointed by their political party. “[They] see each other as existential threats to the nation and its democracy,” Johnson said.
On the other hand, most election administrators “run their offices in a professional way and want to get the count right” despite their personal views, said Matt Weil, Bipartisan Policy Center elections project director. But Weil added that partisan local officials were more of a concern than high-profile statewide officials because they “have access to witnesses, and they have access to ballots… [And there’s] no real good way of monitoring that on any kind of comprehensive scale.”
At a late-March webinar on countering disinformation, Chris Piper, the former Virginia election commissioner, whom Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican elected last fall, recently replaced with Susan Beals, suggested that poll workers could attest to the legitimacy of elections and convince “those folks in the middle that could be swayed either way [by facts or fiction].”
“What we really focused on… was how elections are run by everyday people,” Piper said. “Not only are they run by everyday people, but there are thousands and thousands, literally hundreds of thousands of people that are required to put on a national election… It’s important for us to explain [that] these are your friends, these are your neighbors, co-workers.”
The voices of local poll workers largely have been missing from the responses to election denial. Some Republicans, such as the Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell and GOP election lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg, believe these and other locally respected voices might be persuasive to less ideological voters. During their March 28 podcast, they both said that little else has changed people’s minds.
“I really agree,” said Longwell, whose podcast included comments from focus groups she had convened where Trump supporters would not consider that he lost in 2020. “It has to be hyperlocal because [with] the breakdown of trust, it can’t come from national sources. It has to be from people like them in their communities that they know.”
“Going into 2022 and 2024, I would like to hear from a lot of the poll workers themselves,” she continued. “The people from the community talking about how seriously they take it; and how they stand side by side with other people who [they politically] disagree with… That, to me, is trying to inject some of that civic virtue back into it.”
“I completely agree with that. I think it’s got to be local,” said Ginsberg. “If you need an example of why the national approach doesn’t work: For the past 15 months, the mainstream media, every organization, has repeatedly talked about the big lie… And, as you know from your polls, the number of people who still don’t believe that the elections were accurate has not budged one iota in those 15 months. If anything, it’s gone up.”
“That just tells you that the national messaging from the big media outlets is not getting through, and people do not believe the national entities,” he continued. “We’ve got to start going local, and the communities where you’ve got to go first is pretty self-evident.”
Those communities are the handful of swing counties in swing states, especially jurisdictions targeted by election deniers since 2020. In Georgia, this includes metro-Atlanta counties and outlying areas where pro-Trump Republicans have ousted longtime election officials who are elected Democrats. In Michigan, they are urban counties where Republicans have replaced moderates on canvass boards with pro-Trump loyalists.
On Thursday, the Republican National Committee (RNC) announced that it has unanimously voted to withdraw from the Commission on Presidential Debates, which has been responsible for overseeing presidential debates since the 1980s.
The RNC says that, from now on, it will require candidates to sign a pledge that they won’t participate in general election or primary debates unless the debate has been sanctioned by the party, according to the Wall Street Journal.
This is a significant decision and an escalation from President Donald Trump’s previous grievances with the debate commission. The vote means that unless there is a considerable shakeup in the way that presidential debates are held, Republicans will not participate in presidential debates the way they have been run for decades — though the RNC says that it won’t be pulling candidates out entirely.
RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel said in a statement that the RNC believes, without evidence, that debates have been “biased” against Republicans. The committee will work to “find newer, better debate platforms.”
The debate commission was formed as a nonprofit in 1987 with sponsorship from both Republican and Democratic parties.
The RNC has signaled in the past months that it will be withdrawing candidates from debates. Earlier this year, the committee sent a letter to the debate commission threatening to leave if the commission didn’t reorganize its format.
Trump regularly complained that debates were biased against him; in 2020, he withdrew from the second presidential debate with now-President Joe Biden, which was slated to be held virtually after Trump contracted COVID-19. At the first debate,Trump had taken issue with moderator Chris Wallace, then a Fox News anchor, and talked over both Wallace and Biden nearly the entire time.
Before Trump, Republicans had been complaining for years that the debates were biased; in 2012, Republicans took issue with the fact that a debate moderator corrected Mitt Romney during a debate.
Ironically, in their current TV-friendly format, debates are actually biased toward Republicans, political commentators have pointed out. The current format allowed Trump to hog speaking time during the Wallace-moderated debate and gave a huge litany of lies a legitimized platform.
Trump essentially used the debates to lie about the climate crisis, health care, election fraud, and other issues; although fact checkers — who often carry a right-wing bias at corporate news outlets — had flagged many of Trump’s lies as false, not all viewers follow the fact checkers as they watch.
Left-leaning commentators have long taken issue with the current presidential debate format, which they argue is more about spectacle for cable news audiences than about substantial policy debates — though the current format is still preferable to whatever the GOP could come up with, they say.
Former President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he pressured then-Attorney General Bill Barr to pursue bogus voter fraud claims after his election loss even if it meant being impeached.
Trump claimed in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity that Barr did not want to investigate his baseless voter fraud claims because he was worried about being impeached even though Barr has repeatedly said the Justice Department did not pursue the claims because there was no evidence of any widespread fraud that could have affected the election outcome.
“Look, we also had a chance, but Bill Barr, the attorney general, didn’t want to be impeached,” Trump said. “How do you not get impeached? You sit back and relax and wait out for your term to end. That’s what he did. And it was a sad thing and a sad day for our country.”
Trump also lashed out at Barr for writing what he called a “crummy book” that was “so false.” Barr in his book rejected Trump’s debunked fraud claims and blamed him for the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot, arguing that Trump was not fit for office.
“Had Bill Barr had the courage, a lot of this could’ve been taken care of,” Trump said. “The U.S. Attorney in Philadelphia said Bill Barr told him not to investigate the fraud in the elections, and he said ‘Don’t do it.’ And he wrote a letter to that effect and you know, had Bill Barr had the courage to do what he should’ve done instead of being worried about being impeached.
“I said, ‘Look, get impeached. I went up a lot in the polls when I got impeached. You have to get impeached, maybe,’” Trump added. “But he was so afraid of being impeached that he refused to do his job.”
Here’s what Trump told Hannity he instructed Bill Barr to do:
Barr had been a top Trump loyalist who helped run interference in special counsel Bob Mueller’s investigation and led the administration’s violent crackdown on Black Lives Matter protests. But Barr told MSNBC that Trump became enraged at him after he told him the election fraud “stuff was bullshit.” Barr blindsided Trump in December 2020 by giving an interview revealing that the DOJ had found no evidence of widespread fraud, which led him to being pushed out just weeks before Trump left office. Trump continued to pursue the false fraud claims, culminating in the Capitol riot and his record-setting second impeachment. He left office with the lowest approval rating on record.
Barr in his book wrote that Trump surrounded himself with “sycophants” and “whack jobs from outside the government, who fed him a steady diet of comforting but unsupported conspiracy theories.” He said that the “absurd lengths” to which Trump took the conspiracy theory “led to the rioting on Capitol Hill.”
But despite criticizing his former boss, Barr vowed to vote for Trump if he is the Republican nominee in 2024 even though he is “going to support somebody else for the nomination.”
Barr isn’t the only former DOJ official Trump has lashed out this week for not doing enough to help him try to steal the election. The former president issued an anti-endorsement of sorts against Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Bill McSwain, the former U.S. attorney in Philadelphia that Trump mentioned in his Hannity interview.
“He was the U.S. Attorney who did absolutely nothing on the massive Election Fraud that took place in Philadelphia and throughout the commonwealth,” Trump said in a statement on Tuesday.
McSwain last year sent Trump a letter seeking his endorsement and blaming Barr for stopping him from investigating the bogus fraud claims.
“He should have done his job anyway,” Trump said. “Do not vote for Bill McSwain, a coward, who let our country down. He knew what was happening and let it go. It was there for the taking and he failed so badly. Many of the U.S. Attorneys were probably told not to do anything by Barr. Hence, our Country is going to hell.”
While Trump has not endorsed a candidate in the race, every viable candidate in the race is an election conspiracist. Leading GOP candidates Doug Mastriano and Lou Barletta even took part in Trump’s fraudulent elector scheme.
But as Trump and his allies continue to stoke debunked claims about the 2020 election, the schtick seems to be wearing thin on Republicans concerned the conspiracy theory mongering could cost them key seats in the midterms. Trump’s recent endorsements have prompted infighting among his supporters and his rally attendance has dwindled, suggesting a “very shrinking base,” one Republican strategist said.
“Many Republicans are tired of going back and rehashing the 2020 election,” longtime Republican pollster Frank Luntz told The Daily Beast. “Everybody else has moved on and in Washington, everyone believes he lost the election.”
The ACLU and Planned Parenthood announced late Wednesday that they are suing Kentucky after the state’s GOP-dominated Legislature voted to override the Democratic governor’s veto of a sweeping 15-week abortion ban, an extreme measure inspired by the Mississippi law that is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Kentucky Legislature’s vote put the new ban into effect immediately, forcing the state’s only two abortion providers to stop offering care. The law, sponsored by state Rep. Nancy Tate (R-27), imposes sweeping restrictions on medication abortion, which accounts for roughly half of all abortions carried out in Kentucky.
By forcing the state’s providers to cease operations, the law will effectively ban all abortions in Kentucky, reproductive rights advocates said. Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute told the Wall Street Journal that the ban could make Kentucky the first state in nearly five decades to block access to abortion at any stage of pregnancy.
Planned Parenthood, the national ACLU, and the ACLU of Kentucky announced just on the heels of Wednesday’s vote that they are taking legal action in an effort to keep the providers open and operating while the ban, known as H.B. 3, is litigated. They hope, ultimately, to overturn the law, which they deemed “cruel and unconstitutional.”
The groups argued that compliance with the new law is impossible by design. Specifically, they noted that in order to offer medication abortion under the new restrictions, providers must complete a registration process that the state has not even set up yet. The organizations also contended that some of the law’s reporting requirements amount to violations of patient privacy.
“Make no mistake: the Kentucky Legislature’s sole goal with this law is to shut down health centers and completely eliminate abortion access in the state,” Planned Parenthood said in a statement. “But we haven’t lost hope — we’re getting to work. Trust us when we say that we will do everything in our power to stop this insidious law from preventing Kentuckians from accessing the vital, time-sensitive healthcare they need and deserve.”
Brigitte Amiri, deputy director of the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, argued that “the Kentucky Legislature was emboldened by a similar 15-week ban pending before the Supreme Court and other states passing abortion bans, including in Florida and Oklahoma, but this law and others like it remain unconstitutional.”
“We urge the court to block this law immediately,” Amiri added, “and ensure that people in Kentucky can continue to access abortion care.”
BREAKING: KY lawmakers just overrode @GovAndyBeshear’s veto of #HB3, a slate of abortion care restrictions that includes a total ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
No person should be forced to carry a pregnancy against their will.
The Kentucky Legislature’s move came less than 48 hours after Oklahoma’s Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt signed into law a measure that bars healthcare professionals from performing abortions at any stage of pregnancy. Similar to the new Kentucky law and the Mississippi ban, the Oklahoma measure contains a narrow exception for pregnant patients whose lives are at risk.
The Oklahoma ban is set to take effect in August.
“With the Texas six-week ban in place, many people are traveling to Oklahoma to get care,” Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement earlier this week. “We’ve sued the state of Oklahoma ten times in the last decade to protect abortion access and we will challenge this law as well to stop this travesty from ever taking effect.”
In 2022, according to the Guttmacher Institute, Republican lawmakers in 41 states have introduced 529 legislative proposals to restrict abortion, and such restrictions have taken effect in a number of states, from Arizona to Idaho to Wyoming.
The growing wave of state-level abortion bans comes as legislation aimed at codifying Roe v. Wade into federal law remains stuck in the U.S. Senate due to the opposition of every Republican and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who joined the GOP in filibustering the legislation in late February.
In a statement following the Kentucky Legislature’s vote on Wednesday, U.S. Senate candidate Charles Booker — who is vying for Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) seat — said that “women have officially been told their lives don’t matter in the Commonwealth of Kentucky.”
“H.B. 3 is abhorrent, unconstitutional, and absolutely shameful,” said Booker. “Today’s actions only underscore how critical it is that the United States Senate pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, which is exactly what I intend on doing when I am elected this November.”
Republicans have been denying corporations’ role in rising prices and instead blaming inflation on Democrats. But a new investigation has found that the same corporations that profited greatly from rising inflation last year have also donated millions to those same Republicans.
A new report by Accountable.US finds that 18 Republicans who have been the most vocal in shielding corporations from being blamed for rising prices have received over $5.7 million in donations from roughly 30 top companies that reported making $151 million more in 2021 than they did in 2020.
These Republicans have gone to great lengths to blame the inflation on Democrats in the face of mounting evidence that corporations are at least partially responsible for the current squeeze on consumers.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) was the leading fundraiser among these Republicans; McConnell has taken $1.24 million from companies like Walmart, ExxonMobil and Pfizer during his time in office. Earlier this year, he issued a press release saying that the Biden administration is “failing” the working class and that this administration cannot take credit for the current economic recovery.
In reality, McConnell has gone to great lengths to harm middle- and lower-income workers during the pandemic. He voted against last March’s economic stimulus, which provided a much-needed boost to working Americans’ bank accounts, and decried Democrats’ social safety net bill last year as a “liberal wish list.” Those bills contained provisions like the expanded child tax credit that helped the poor and might have done much more if they had not been slashed.
Meanwhile, as inflation reaches new highs, corporations have been reaching into the pockets of the working class in order to pad their own profits and pay out shareholders. Recent data has shown that corporate profits reached record highs in 2021, growing by 25 percent year-over-year to $3 trillion. At the same time, price hikes, especially for essential goods, are hitting low-income people the hardest,
Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Missouri), another loud inflation critic, has taken $946,000 in donations from the top profiting companies. Last month, he specifically criticized Democrats for saying that corporations are responsible for high prices, saying instead that inflation was due to the COVID relief package. Other Republicans, like Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pennsylvania) and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Washington), have made similar claims while sitting on hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from top corporations.
While economic experts say that the relief package may have added to inflation, they also say that pandemic-driven uncertainty like supply chain issues are a much stronger driver of inflation rates. Meanwhile, corporations claim in public that inflation is what’s causing them to raise prices – when, in shareholder calls, they are bragging about raising prices beyond inflation costs and buying back stocks at record high rates.
“You don’t see any correlation between inflation and the generosity of fiscal relief. Inflation is up everywhere, regardless of whether countries were stingy or generous,” Economic Policy Institute director Josh Bivens told Salon. “You also have to think, ‘What did we get for a couple of percentage points of inflation?’ We got 6.5 million jobs created over a 13-month span – that is an incredibly fast rate of growth that just absolutely dwarfs any other recovery we’ve had before.”
Republicans are also opposed to policies suggested by Democrats that could stop the price gouging and ease the burden on working class Americans. Last month, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) introduced a bill that would levy a 95 percent tax on all excess profits for large corporations in order to ensure that companies aren’t taking advantage of crises like the pandemic and conflict abroad to price gouge.
GOP lawmakers roundly opposed the idea. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) called the idea a “disaster,” while Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said – without evidence – that Democrats were “misdiagnosing the cause of inflation.”
On Monday, a group of House Democrats introduced a bill guaranteeing that workers get paid time off to vote in federal elections as other voting rights initiatives have fallen flat.
The Time Off to Vote Act, introduced by Representatives Nikema Williams (D-Georgia), Matt Cartwright (D-Pennsylvania), Cheri Bustos (D-Illinois) and Andy Levin (D-Michigan), would require employers to give their employees at least two hours off of work to vote, either on election day or on a day with early voting.
Many states have no regulations requiring that workers get time off to vote; even in states that do guarantee that right, many only require that workers get unpaid time off, meaning that workers may not be able to take advantage of the benefit without suffering financially.
The bill would help to normalize regulations for paid time off across the country, a critical step toward expanding voting access. It requires that the paid time off be separate from workers’ existing benefits.
“No one should be forced to choose between earning their full paycheck or participating in our democracy,” Williams said in a statement. “In the last two elections, countless Georgians waited in line for hours to vote. Many waited all day. The Time off to Vote Act will make it easier for working people to exercise their sacred right to vote.”
For months, Democrats have tried — and failed — to pass legislation to protect voting rights. President Joe Biden emphasized the issue during his first year in office, but Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) killed Democrats’ hope of being able to pass sweeping anti-corruption election bills like the For the People Act, which voting rights advocates have said are crucial to protecting democracy.
The Time Off to Vote Act has been introduced in previous years, but has never been taken to a vote. Proposals like making Election Day a federal holiday also aim to ensure that work isn’t a barrier to being able to vote, but about a quarter of workers don’t receive days off on federal holidays, according to a 2018 federal survey.
Not being able to get time off to vote is a major barrier to voting, making it hard or impossible for people to cast their ballots. According to a FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll conducted after the 2020 election, waiting in long voting lines and not having time off are two of the top barriers to voting. With Republicans creating stricter guidelines for mail-in ballot access, some people may be blocked from voting at all.
These barriers affect Black and Latinx voters disproportionately. Racist voter suppression policies have led to fewer polling stations in predominantly Black and Latinx neighborhoods, meaning that people in these communities often have to wait in line for hours to vote; data has shown that Black and Latinx voters wait about 45 percent longer on average than white voters.
Voters in poorer neighborhoods are also more likely to face long lines while waiting to vote — and for many low-income people, this is an impassable hurdle. Some workers aren’t allowed to take time off to vote, and those that have the option of taking unpaid time off often can’t afford to do so, especially when they may have to wait hours in line.
While the Time Off to Vote Act could help expand voting access, two hours may still not be enough in places like Georgia, where some workers waited 10 hours or more to vote in the 2020 presidential election.
The Alabama state legislature passed a measure on Thursday that would ban transgender students in public schools from using restrooms that correspond to their gender identities. If the bill is signed into law by the state’s Republican governor, it would also restrict teachers from discussing sexual orientation or gender in K-5 classrooms.
The bill originally only included restroom restrictions for transgender youth. Republican lawmakers who sponsored and supported the discriminatory bill did so under the guise of protecting children, specifically young girls.
However, numerous studies have shown that there are no dangers at all when it comes to allowing transgender students to use restrooms that correspond to their gender identities. In fact, the opposite is true: Restrictive bathroom bills actually endanger trans students, as transgender children face higher rates of harassment, sexual assault and violence when they are forced to use the incorrect restrooms.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Alabama condemned the legislation, describing it as being discriminatory and “in violation of the United States Constitution and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act.”
“This legislation is part of a systematic and growing attack on trans people, particularly trans youth, in all aspects of life,” the organization said in a statement.
Democratic lawmakers lambasted the Republican-sponsored legislation as being cruel to trans students.
As the bill was being debated, lawmakers added another amendment at the last minute — a rider that would ban teachers in K-5 classrooms from discussing issues related to sexuality or gender identity, similar to the “Don’t Say Gay” legislation that was recently signed into law in the neighboring state of Florida.
Sally Smith, executive director of the Alabama Association of School Boards, said that the amendment wasn’t necessary, as such topics aren’t brought up in those grades to begin with. But the amendment would still be harmful to LGBTQ kids, she added, as it “could make it even more difficult for school faculty to create safe environments for some students and families.”
The bill now goes to Gov. Kay Ivey’s (R) desk for consideration. Based on recent political ads from her campaign that target trans kids in the state, there’s a high likelihood that she will sign the bill into law.
This week, the Alabama legislature also passed a bill that would criminalize the provision of gender affirming care to transgender youth — treatment that can often be life-saving. If Ivey signs the bill into law, it would create the strictest regulations on such care in the country, banning treatments for individuals up to the age of 19 and punishing doctors and nurses who provide such care with up to 10 years in prison.
“If passed and signed into law, Alabama will have the most deadly, sweeping, and hostile law targeting transgender people in the country,” trans lawyer Chase Strangio said.
The Senate has confirmed Kentanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, making her the first Black woman Supreme Court justice in history.
Senators voted 53 to 47 to confirm Jackson on Thursday. Three Republicans joined all Democratic senators in voting “yes.” Jackson will be replacing Justice Stephen Breyer, who announced his retirement earlier this year. She is expected to be sworn in sometime mid-summer.
Jackson was the most progressive person being considered for the job by President Joe Biden, who had pledged to nominate a Black woman to the High Court. Jackson, a former public defender, is the only person on the Supreme Court who has represented criminal defendants, including people detained in Guantánamo Bay. The last justice with experience as a public defender was Thurgood Marshall, who retired in 1991.
As a D.C. Circuit Court judge, Jackson made rulings favoring unions, including one in 2018, when she rejected executive orders crafted by former President Donald Trump to limit federal workers’ ability to collectively bargain.
With several confirmation hearings for other federal judgeships under her belt, most recently for her role as a judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, she is the most highly vetted modern Supreme Court justice.
During her confirmation hearing, Jackson faced a slew of baseless attacks from far right lawmakers, who used the hearing to bring up their bigoted grievances about racial justice and LGBTQ people. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) berated Jackson seemingly just for being Black, framing her as a proponent of the right’s fabricated version of movements for racial justice, while Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) demanded that Jackson define what a woman is in a series of questions aimed at attacking trans people.
“Watch your step, concrete ceiling just shattered,” wrote Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts). “Congratulations to the Honorable SUPREME. COURT. JUSTICE. Ketanji Brown Jackson. Now read that again.”
A new national survey has found that the daily lives of a majority of adults in the U.S. have not fully returned the pre-pandemic “normal,” and large majorities of people of color and lower-income adults — who are more likely to work frontline jobs — say everyone should remain diligent about COVID precautions such as masking in public.
Despite the lifting of COVID restrictions across the country and media hype about “pandemic fatigue,” six in ten U.S. adults agree that people should continue wearing masks in some public places to avoid future surges of infections, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. A slim majority said they continue to wear protective masks in indoor public places all or most of the time, while 19 percent said they never mask in public, including 37 percent of Republicans and, alarmingly, 44 percent of unvaccinated adults.
The survey found sharp divisions on pandemic precautions, falling along class, partisan and racial lines, as well as between the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations. People of color, people suffering from chronic medical conditions and lower-income adults are much more likely to support continued pandemic precautions, while nearly seven in ten Republicans and 67 percent of unvaccinated adults say people should stop masking in public so life can “get back to normal.”
The survey comes as the initial Omicron surge fades, leaving a daily average of roughly 27,000 new cases nationally. The number of cases reported by public health officials and the media are likely an undercount because more people are using at-home COVID tests, resulting in less available data.
While infection rates have fallen sharply since peaking January, more than a dozen states have seen an increase in cases over the past two weeks, including in the heavily populated northeast. Cases in New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts are up by more than 30 percent, according to the New York Times COVID tracker. Public health experts remain concerned about future surges fueled by BA.2 and other Omicron variants, which pose an acute risk to the unvaccinated, especially if they were not infected recently.
The survey also highlights the uneven burdens of the pandemic. Large majorities of Black and Latinx respondents (88 percent and 69 percent, respectively) said that people should continue masking in some public places to prevent future surges. Researchers said this may be because more people of color work in service industries than white people. Notably, 68 percent of respondents making less than $40,000 per year said everyone should continue masking in public places. Lower-income people were also more likely to say that the pandemic has had negative impacts on employment and finances.
“Masking works best in all situations if the masking is universal,” said Abdullah Shihipar, a narrative projects director at the People, Place & Health Collective at the Brown University School of Public Health, in a statement on Monday.
Nearly 60 percent of adults say they have not fully returned to activities they did before the pandemic, with 42 percent reporting that they have returned to some but not all activities, and 17 percent reporting that they engage in few pre-pandemic activities. These numbers are even higher among Democrats, who overwhelmingly support continued masking in public.
However, majorities of Republicans (55 percent), unvaccinated adults (57 percent) and nearly half of all white adults say they never changed their activities due to COVID or have basically returned to “normal.”
In comparison, only 25 percent of Black respondents said they never changed their activities due to the pandemic or their lives have returned to “normal.” More than 80 percent of Black adults say they are masking in public all or most of the time. Among adults with chronic health conditions, 65 percent said they are still avoiding at least some activities due to COVID.
Proponents argue that lifting masking requirements poses a deadly threat to frontline workers and people facing health risks.
The federal masking requirement for public transportation — including airplanes — is set to expire on April 18. Fifty-one percent of survey respondents said the requirement should be allowed to expire, while 49 percent say the requirement should be extended, a reflection of the current deep divisions over whether masking should be a personal choice.
In an open letter to President Joe Biden last month, CEOs for major airlines and a lobbying group argued that the federal government should allow mask requirements for airplanes to sunset. The letter sparked a debate among public health experts and masking proponents, with some experts suggesting that masking requirements could be lifted for vaccinated travelers, and airlines could designate a special section of the airplane for people who want extra protection and prefer to sit with others wearing masks.
Shihipar said airlines are unlikely to separate passengers based on masks, and if the transportation requirement is allowed to expire, airplane travel would likely reflect the situation on the ground, with the decision to mask left up to individuals.
“A masking section [on planes] makes little sense; the air is shared and there would be people without masks in [close] proximity to people with masks,” Shihipar said. “It also has the potential to open up those who are masking to harassment” by anti-maskers who see them separated from other passengers.
On Tuesday, the Arizona state Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit from the state’s Republican Party that sought to completely eliminate mail-in voting.
The Arizona Republican Party’s attempt to abolish or severely curtail mail-in voting in the state is part of a nationwide push by the GOP to place more restrictions on voting in response to former President Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.
Republicans issued the request to Arizona’s highest court earlier this year, asking it to dismantle the mail-in voting system, or, failing that, to eliminate the “no excuse” provision of its statute that allows any eligible voter in the state to request an absentee ballot. That provision has been allowed in the state since 1991, meaning that it has been utilized in the last eight presidential election cycles.
Nevertheless, the party argued in its lawsuit that “in-person voting at the polls on a fixed date (election day) is the only constitutional manner of voting in Arizona.”
“This is yet another attempt by the Arizona Republicans to make it harder for people to vote,” said state Sen. Raquel Terán, who is also the chair of the Arizona Democratic Party.
Earlier this week, Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat and a defendant in the lawsuit, condemned the state GOP’s attempt to eradicate mail-in voting.
“Abolishing early voting doesn’t make our elections more secure — it just makes it harder for eligible Arizonans to vote,” Hobbs, who is also running for governor, wrote in a tweet. “These partisan attacks on our freedom to vote are about suppressing the vote, not protecting it.”
Although the ruling is a win for voting rights, the victory may be short-lived. In its ruling, the Arizona state Supreme Court said that they rejected the Republican Party’s lawsuit because it hadn’t gone through the proper channels. The party can resubmit their complaint in lower state courts, the court said.
Still, the temporary win for voting rights will likely be enough to ensure that mail-in voting remains an option for registered voters in the state, at least through the 2022 midterm elections later this year. Arizona Republicans were hopeful that the state Supreme Court would rule in their favor before November, tossing out mail-in voting before this year’s races.
Any attempt to dismantle mail-in voting would be an unpopular choice in the state. Recent polling indicates that Arizonans overwhelmingly support keeping voting by mail as an option in elections, with 74 percent backing the measure and only 10 percent saying they oppose it.
Republicans in Tennessee are pushing a bill through the GOP-controlled legislature that would establish an “alternative form of marriage,” creating a class of common-law marriage that would be limited to heterosexual people and circumvent age limits.
The bill, HB 233, would make it so that children of any age could be married. The bill’s main sponsor, Republican state Rep. Tom Leatherwood, told WKRN that the bill would create “an alternative form of marriage for those pastors and other individuals who have a conscientious objection to the current pathway to marriage in our law.” He has confirmed that “[t]here is not an explicit age limit.”
Only heterosexual people would be allowed to be married under the new class of marriage, which defines marriage as being between “one man” and “one woman.” It was likely filed as a homophobic response to a ruling against former Kentucky clerk Kim Davis last month, in which a federal judge found that Davis had violated couples’ constitutional rights when she refused to marry them because they were gay.
“I don’t think any normal person thinks we shouldn’t have an age requirement for marriage,” said Democratic state Rep. Mike Stewart, adding that Republicans are essentially seeking to give people a free pass for “statutory rape.”
Lawmakers, along with gender-based violence and sexual assault survivor advocates, have raised concerns that eliminating an age limit for marriage would open up doors for children to be abused. In recent years, some states have been considering raising their age limit for marriage in order to prevent child abuse.
“The Sexual Assault Center does not believe the age of consent for marriage should be any younger than it already is,” the Sexual Assault Center of Middle Tennessee told WKRN. “It makes children more vulnerable to coercion and manipulation from predators, sexual and other.”
Research from 2021 found that nearly 300,000 children were married in the U.S. between 2000 and 2018. Although the age of consent in most states is 18, children can be married as young as 16 with parental consent in many states — meaning that a child could potentially be coerced into marriage with their rapist. Only five states currently bar marriage for children.
Republicans across the country, including in Tennessee, have been passing bills specifically targeted at LGBTQ youths; advocates say that these bills would similarly lead to child abuse. GOP lawmakers in Tennessee have passed especially strict bills specifically targeting transgender children, banning them from participating in sports that align with their gender and barring school districts from freely teaching about sexual orientation or gender.
In Florida, Republicans passed a bill last year that would allow adults to inspect children’s genitals if they think that the child is transgender. The bill would leave children vulnerable to both discrimination and sexual abuse.
A former Trump administration official who is running for Congress in New Hampshire voted in two different states’ Republican primaries in 2016, potentially violating federal law, according to the Associated Press.
Matt Mowers, who served as a White House adviser under Trump before landing a senior job at the State Department, voted via an absentee ballot in New Hampshire’s pivotal 2016 presidential primary while he was still working as the head of former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s presidential campaign in the state, according to records obtained by the AP. But after Christie’s White House bid sank, Mowers cast another ballot in the New Jersey presidential primary after re-registering to vote using his parents’ address.
Mowers is the latest former Trump aide to potentially run afoul of voting laws after former chief of staff Mark Meadows registered to vote at a North Carolina mobile home that he may have never visited. Meadows, who helped Trump push repeatedly debunked lies about his election loss, is facing a state investigation into whether he committed voter fraud.
Legal experts say Mowers may have violated a federal law against “voting more than once” in “any general, special, or primary election,” which includes voting in separate jurisdictions “for an election to the same candidacy or office.”
“What he has done is cast a vote in two different states for the election of a president, which on the face of it looks like he’s violated federal law,” David Schultz, an election law expert at the University of Minnesota Law School, told the AP. “You get one bite at the voting apple.”
The issue could also create campaign headaches for Mowers, who is the leading Republican candidate to take on Rep. Chris Pappas, D-N.H. The Republican-led New Hampshire state legislature last week advanced a bill aimed at preventing short-term residents from participating in its first-in-the-nation primary.
Critics hammered Mowers for potentially running afoul of voting laws as Trump and his Republican allies continue to stoke voter fraud lies, especially after Meadows was implicated.
“Their concerns about voter fraud were always projection,” tweeted Miranda Yaver, a political science professor at Oberlin College.
“Funny how all the voter fraud we have found was committed by the GOP,” quipped Tim Fullerton, a former Obama administration aide.
“Weird that this keeps happening,” wroteNew York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie. “I guess we know why Republicans are so certain voter fraud is a problem.”
But it’s unlikely that Mowers will face any accountability despite recent high-profileinstances of Black voters facing steep punishments for running afoul of voting rules.
“There is little chance Mowers could face prosecution,” the AP reported, noting that the statute of limitations has lapsed and there is no record of anyone being prosecuted under this specific section of federal election law. A separate state law bars double-voting in different states but includes an exception if the voter “legitimately moved his or her domicile.”
John Corbett, a spokesman for Mowers, did not directly comment on the double-voting in a statement to the AP.
“Matt was proud to work for President Trump as the GOP establishment was working to undermine his nomination,” he told the outlet. “Matt moved for work and was able to participate in the primary in support of President Trump and serve as a delegate at a critical time for the Republican Party and country.”
Republican election lawyer Charlie Spies, who contacted the AP at the request of Mowers’ campaign, told the outlet that the matter was “silly” and that double-voting was “at worst a gray area” of the law and “not the sort of issue anybody would spend time on.”
Independent legal experts say the issue is not cut-and-dried.
“With the right set of facts, it could be construed as a violation, but it’s just not at all obvious to me that it is,” Steven Huefner, an election law expert at Ohio State University law school, told the AP. “It is a pretty murky question.”
Mowers, who also ran and lost to Pappas in 2020 despite Trump’s endorsement, grew up in New Jersey and worked for Christie when he was the state’s governor. He was ultimately embroiled in Christie’s 2016 “Bridgegate” scandal, which led to the convictions of two top Christie allies, though Mowers was not accused of wrongdoing himself. He moved to New Hampshire in 2013 to take on a top job at the state Republican Party and then joined Christie’s 2016 campaign. After Christie bowed out, Mowers moved back to New Jersey to work for a lobbying firm before joining the Trump campaign in July 2016 and later Trump’s administration.
Trump has not publicly backed Mowers’ latest congressional bid but WMUR reported that former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski would have an “active role” in Mowers’ campaign. Trump’s former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley also recently stumped for Mowers.
Mowers has backed the Republican Party’s voting crackdown in the wake of Trump’s loss. His website touts so-called “election integrity” as a top issue to “provide every American citizen with the certainty that their vote counts.” He also backs Republican state legislation to ensure “only legal residents of New Hampshire are entitled to vote.”
More than 50 civil society organizations on Friday accused Republican senators of engaging in “baseless and harmful attacks” on U.S. Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson during her Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings last week.
In a letter taking aim at — but not naming — GOP senators including Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Josh Hawley (Mo.), and Tom Cotton (Ark.) who questioned the nominee’s assigned public defense advocacy on behalf of Guantánamo Bay detainees, the 56 groups said that “attacks made on Judge Jackson’s service as a federal public defender and the clients she vigorously represented are spurious and undermine one of the central tenets of our democracy.”
“As Judge Jackson noted at the hearing, ‘federal public defenders don’t get to pick their clients,’” the organizations wrote. “‘They have to represent whoever comes in and it’s a service. That’s what you do as a federal public defender: You are standing up for the constitutional value of representation.’”
BREAKING: With 55 other groups, we wrote to the Senate raising serious concerns about some senators’ baseless & harmful attacks on Judge Jackson’s record.
History will remember this moment. We urge all senators to bring fairness & honesty to this process. https://t.co/J2gzVDZy6Z
— The Leadership Conference (@civilrightsorg) April 1, 2022
The letter continued:
The right to counsel is one of our nation’s most bedrock principles, helping to fulfill the constitutional promise of a fair trial and the Sixth Amendment’s right to counsel. The Supreme Court has reinforced the right to counsel, considering it a ‘fundamental right essential to a fair trial.’
Thus, the work of public defenders and criminal defense lawyers is critical. Those who enter public service as public defenders and criminal defense lawyers—like Judge Jackson and so many others—should be commended, not maligned.
The letter also addressed the Republican committee members’ incessant grilling of Jackson over her sentencing record in child pornography cases.
“As those who have closely studied this issue explain, Judge Jackson’s sentences were well within the range of her peers,” the groups wrote. “The 2021 U.S. Sentencing Commission report noted that less than 30% of people convicted of nonproduction child sexual abuse material offenses received a sentence within the guideline range. Such discrepancies were also described to Congress in a 2012 report by the U.S. Sentencing Commission. In these reports, the commission recommended Congress change the guidelines, yet… Congress has not implemented the commission’s statutory or guideline recommendations.”
“It is within Congress’ authority, not the courts’, to update sentencing guidelines,” the letter stressed.
The groups contended that “the attacks on Judge Jackson’s record grossly mischaracterize her work and threaten the ideals of our democracy.”
“Despite these inappropriate and knowingly misleading attacks,” the signers said, “Judge Jackson showed a poised and patient judicial temperament, reminding senators that constitutional protections are not privileges reserved for a select few, but rights afforded to us all. This is a much-needed perspective on our highest court.”
A circuit judge on Thursday found the Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, a Republican, in contempt of court for refusing to turn over documents relating to the state’s recount of the 2020 presidential election.
“Robin Vos had delegated the search for contractors’ records to an employee who did nothing more than send one vague email to one contractor,” wrote Dane County Judge Valerie Bailey-Rihn. “Putting aside for the moment the impropriety of making a contractor responsible for a records request … Robin Vos did not tell [sic] that contractor which records to produce, did not ask any of the other contractors to produce records, and did not even review the records ultimately received. Still worse, the Assembly did nothing at all.”
Bailey-Rihn has ordered Vos to release the materials within fourteen days or pay a daily fine of $1,000 any time after that, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Bailey-Rihn established that, if the documents aren’t provided, Vos must provide an explanation.
Wednesday’s ruling stems from an inquiry Vos launched back in May off the back of Donald Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud. According to The Washington Post, Vos’ sham audit, which has a taxpayer-funded budget of $700,000, has enlisted the help of retired police officers and an attorney. Thus far, Vos has also subpoenaed scores of election officials across the state in metropolitan areas like Green Bay, Racine and Milwaukee.
In October, nonpartisan watchdog American Oversight filed a lawsuit against Vos and the Wisconsin State Assembly demanding that the judge release records detailing the investigation — a request that Bailey-Rihn has now affirmed.
“Speaker Vos and the Assembly have had ample opportunity to comply with the court’s order and produce records,” Bailey-Rihn wrote.
Still, Bailey-Rihn’s ruling only deals with one of three suits filed by American Oversight.
Vos, for his part, has suggested that Bailey-Rihn’s ruling is part of a politically-motivated smear campaign.
“It’s a liberal judge in Dane County trying to make us look bad. I don’t know about you, but when you have deleted emails, how do you get deleted emails back if they’re from Gmail?” he said, according to Madison.com. “We already have an expert saying they can’t be done. You have a judge who’s focused on making a name for herself, and that’s all she’s doing.”
Thus far, no substantive evidence has emerged to justify the Vos’ recount, for which he is being paid $11,000 a month. President Biden defeated Trump by a margin of 21,000 votes in Wisconsin, a result that a conservative law firm confirmed in December after a ten-month review of the election.
The ruling against the GOP speaker comes amid another outrage over the Republican takeover of the state’s Natural Resources Board, which, like Vos’ sham audit, is benefiting from a highly partisan State Assembly willing to defy the norms of good government.
On Friday, the Wisconsin State Journal editorial board called on Fred Prehn to resign from the Natural Resources Board over his refusal to step down eleven months after his term expired. Prehn will theoretically be able to continue serving until his replacement is confirmed by the State Assembly, whose Republican caucus is indefinitely delaying the transition.
“Prehn seems to think he can serve for life, like an emperor,” the Wisconsin State Journal editorial board wrote. “If that’s true, then good government in Wisconsin is further eroded — along with the public’s ability to hold government officials accountable.”
Civil rights defenders on Thursday welcomed a ruling by a federal judge who struck down parts of a Florida voter suppression law, calling racism “a motivating factor” in the GOP-backed legislation’s passage.
In a 288-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Mark Walker blocked provisions of Florida’s Senate Bill 90, a massive attack on voting rights signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2020. The law empowers partisan poll watchers, imposes strict voter ID requirements, criminalizes so-called “ballot harvesting,” limits ballot drop boxes, and bans advocacy groups from handing out food or water to voters waiting in long lines.
“At some point, when the Florida Legislature passes law after law disproportionately burdening Black voters, this court can no longer accept that the effect is incidental,” Walker wrote. “Based on the indisputable pattern set out above, this court finds that, in the past 20 years, Florida has repeatedly sought to make voting tougher for Black voters because of their propensity to favor Democratic candidates.”
Cecile Scoon, president of the League of Women Voters of Florida — the lead plaintiff in the case — said in a statement that “for democracy to work, it must include all voices. A federal judge has ruled that the Florida Legislature has engaged in decades of intentional discrimination against Black voters with a series of voting laws” like S.B. 90.
In an extraordinary move, the judge also placed Florida under preclearance requirements for the next decade — a power granted to federal courts under Section 3(c) of the VRA if they find that jurisdictions have engaged in intentional discrimination in voting practices.
“Senate Bill 90 was clearly an anti-voter measure that raised barriers to voting for marginalized groups with specific impacts on elderly voters, voters with disabilities, students, and communities of color,” Scoon added. “The league is gratified that once again the constitutional rights of all of Florida’s voters have superseded partisan politics and that the targeted attack on Black voters will be stopped.”
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) senior counsel Amia Trigg said that “today’s decision is a huge win for Florida voters. This decision recognized that S.B. 90 is the latest stain in a long history of voting laws which restrict Black political participation.”
Walker’s ruling also placed Florida in Voting Rights Act preclearance status — meaning the state must receive federal approval before passing new voting laws — for the next decade, because its Republican officials have “repeatedly, recently, and persistently acted to deny Black Floridians access to the franchise.”
“Without preclearance, Florida could continue to enact such laws, replacing them every legislative session if courts view them with skepticism,” the judge wrote. “Such a scheme makes a mockery of the rule of law.”
Walker also took aim at the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holderruling, accusing the justices of “gutting” the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance regime.
“As Judge Walker acknowledged, this is part of a larger assault on voting rights that continues across the country,” Trigg said. “We’re seeing the right to vote being targeted at every level of government. Therefore, it is crucial that we continue this fight.”
“Every voice deserves to be heard in our democracy, and state officials must ensure that by making elections fair and accessible — not by creating unnecessary obstacles to the ballot box,” she added. “This ruling is extremely encouraging for those of us on the frontlines.”
Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at the advocacy group Common Cause, said that “our ‘government by the people’ is stronger and more representative when all of us can participate in it.”
“But as the court found today, for the past 20 years, ‘Florida has repeatedly sought to make voting tougher for Black voters’ as the Legislature worked to pick and choose the voters they want to participate in our government — and the voters they want to exclude,” she added. “This is completely antithetical to our ideals of what a government ‘by the people’ ought to look like. We particularly appreciate that Judge Walker is insisting on 10 years of preclearance through his court.”
According to Edward Hailes, the then-general counsel for the United States Commission on Civil Rights, the intentional disenfranchisement by GOP-led Florida officials of thousands of Black voters “was outcome-determinative” in the state’s — and therefore the nation’s, given the decisive role played by Florida — 2000 presidential election results.
Some observers noted the unlikelihood of Walker’s ruling surviving an appeal to the 11th Circuit or the U.S. Supreme Court, with its 6-3 right-wing supermajority.
This opinion in Florida voting rights case is extraordinary. It’s a full throated (and in my view entirely appropriate given Congress’s intent) application of the Voting Rights Act, calling out Fla for its discrimination against Black voters, knowing it will likely be reversed.
“We’ve seen other district courts do aggressive things in election law cases, and we’ve seen a lot of those decisions get reversed by appellate courts or the Supreme Court,” Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a Harvard Law School professor and election law expert, toldThe New York Times.” I wouldn’t be shocked if this litigation falls into that pattern.”
A favorite quote from Stanley Kunitz, two-time poet laureate of the United States, hangs on a wall in my classroom: “Poets,” he writes, “are not easily domesticated… and they can be outrageous; but they are also idealists and visionaries whose presence is needed… to clear the air of corruption and hypocrisy, to mock oppression, and to challenge [spiritual] apathy.”
Poets, yes, by all means, and teachers and students too, along with citizens and community members, researchers and artists, residents of every stripe and kind. Everyone is invited to clear the air of corruption and hypocrisy, to mock oppression, to challenge apathy — everyone, yes, and with a special duty and burden for teachers.
I’ve taught for more than 50 years, and my students today are all studying to become teachers themselves. They’re an idealistic bunch: They all want to do meaningful work, they all want to do good, and mostly they want to unleash the dreams of youth and change the world — step by step, one student at a time.
The idealism Kunitz describes is a vision most of my students aspire to — not a submissive naïveté nor the willful abandonment of reality, but rather a kind of leaning toward an ideal, embarking on the never-ending pursuit of new knowledge, novel insights and understandings, and that complex, fugitive concept called “truth.” Of course, they fall short — falling short is guaranteed, for enlightenment is always partial, and the truth, in any finished sense, always elusive — but that in no way diminishes the significance of their labor.
This immense journey asks these teachers to reject dogma, orthodoxy and superstition; to unstick themselves from a fantasized past when everything was settled and putatively perfect; and to dismiss the idea that the present moment is in any sense a point of arrival with nothing much up ahead. It encourages them to disregard notions of a fixed, preordained future with every conflict resolved, every synthesis achieved, every mystery explained. It urges them to get busy in projects of repair and renewal, posing new questions, struggling with unique problems. They feel — mostly — up to the challenge.
But, of course, this is not an easy time to become a teacher: The perennial problems of too few resources and too little support are now joined by a weaponized opposition to curiosity and inquiry itself. When Texas State Representative Matt Krause released a list of 850 books and advised school libraries to report whether they had any of the titles on his list, a school district in San Antonio removed more than 400 books. When the McMinn County, Tennessee, school board voted unanimously to ban the Holocaust graphic novel Maus from the school’s classrooms and library, aTennessee pastor organized a book burning, live-streamed on Facebook, where books with “demonic influences,” including Harry Potter and Twilight, were fed to the flames. When Florida passed the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill recently, Gov. Ron DeSantis’s press secretary made its bigoted subtext explicit, calling it an “anti-grooming” law.
As governors and senators join thetroglodyte chorus, it becomes increasingly clear that as terrible as banning authors like Art Spiegelman is in itself, the main targets are my idealistic students and English teachers anywhere in the country.
The main victims of this galloping censorship are children and youth, of course, but it’s important to note that while truth-telling can and is being banned in schools by state legislators and local boards, it’s a wide, wide world out there, and repression activates resistance. Neither kids nor teachers are simply one-dimensional victims of ignorant policy. Teachers are launching Banned Books Clubs and after-school local history study groups at high schools around the country, and the message is clear: You need no one’s permission to interrogate the world.
We’re reading The Life of Galileo by Bertolt Brecht in my class now, and the drama, the tensions and the contradictions feel eerily contemporary. Galileo’s breath-taking discoveries about the movement of the planets and the stars ignite in him the desire to pursue a particularly radical idealism: “The cities are narrow and so are the brains,” he declares boldly. “Superstition and plague. But now the word is: since it is so, it does not remain so. For everything moves, my friend.” Galileo seems at first unstoppable: “It was always said that the stars were fastened to a crystal vault so they could not fall,” he says. “Now we have taken heart and let them float in the air, without support, they are embarked on a great voyage — like us, who are also without support and embarked on a great voyage.”
Here Galileo ups the ante, questioning Church orthodoxy and challenging the establishment in the realm of its own authority. For the Church, the great voyage is a sanctioned and planned journey, the steps mapped out with precision and certainty, and with all the support we will ever need in the institution of the Church itself.
Clearly more than theories of astronomy are at stake. The findings of his research, surely, but also the joy, the excitement, the reckless hope, all mark Galileo as a radical visionary — he wanted to open people’s minds and change the world.
Galileo’s struggle is punctuated with joy and grief, hope and despair, pain and torment and pressure, but when he finally capitulates and denounces what he knows to be true, when he is received back “into the ranks of the faithful” by the Church, he is exiled from humanity — by his own words. In the end, he is confronted by a former student, one of his crestfallen disciples: “Many on all sides followed you with their eyes and ears,” he says, “believing that you stood, not only for a particular view of the movement of the stars, but even more for the liberty of teaching — in all fields. Not then for any particular thoughts, but for the right to think at all. Which is in dispute.”
The liberty of teaching and the right to think at all is a right that is in deep dispute in our schools now, and in the larger society.
Winding 336 miles through Maricopa, Pinal and Pima counties, the Central Arizona Project supplies water from the Colorado River to 80 percent of the state’s population and 40 percent of its farmlands. A drought has prompted the U.S. Department of Interior to implement a Tier-1 shortage for the first time, which will cut 18 percent of Arizona’s water supply from the Colorado River. But during Arizona’s legislative session thus far, bills to address the water shortage have been overshadowed by the 140 bills aimed at preventing so-called election fraud.
Arizona residents like Perri Benemelis, a white 61-year-old water policy analyst, are tired of “election fraud” talk, and many are turning away from the Republican and Democratic parties and registering or identifying as independents.
Benemelis cited proposals for a desalination project in Mexico and the monitoring of groundwater pumping in Mojave County as ways to address the water shortage, but is doubtful it will gain ground in the state legislature.
“Considering the focus on election law probably means we’re not going to see a lot of substantive legislation addressing water availability,” Benemelis said. “We [Arizonans] keep chasing this fantasy that there was fraud in the last election that needs to be addressed. And because of this obsession by our Republican legislature, substantive issues — important issues to the citizens of the state of Arizona — are being largely ignored.”
Independents now make up the largest voter group in the country. As of mid-January, 46 percent of those surveyed by a Gallup poll reported they identify as independents, 28 percent identify as Democrats and 24 percent as Republicans. According to 2018 figures, Independents are most likely to be younger, male and white, but more recent data show their numbers growing among other demographic groups. This group is deciding election outcomes — or at least making election results less predictable. Independent voters, pivotal in swing states including Arizona, Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, favored Donald Trump by 4 percentage points in 2016 and Joe Biden by 13 percentage points in 2020.
Since April 2021, President Biden’s approval rating among independents declined from 68 percent to 36 percent, according to a recent NBC poll. And if the early Texas primaries are any indication for other upcoming primaries later this year, twice the number of Texan independents came out to vote for Republican Gov. Greg Abbott than Democratic candidate Beto O’Rourke. Republican primary turnout exceeded the Democratic primary turnout by nearly 74 percent, far greater than the 45 percent difference in the 2018 midterm elections. Most independents polled are opposed to efforts to remove books from schools and a total abortion ban.
What this means is that while most independents are opposed to culture war politics and extreme political views, which prompted their abandonment of Trump in 2020, the disillusionment with the Biden administration among independents may result in low voter turnout rates for Democratic candidates. Independents could unwillingly propel Republicans towards a congressional majority this year and in 2024 if the Democratic Party does not capture the energy of this growing group of voters.
For the first time in Maricopa County, registered independents and third-party voters, at 35 percent of the total number of registered voters, exceeded the number of registered Republicans and Democrats. Statewide, independents and third-party voters make up 34.2 percent, just behind Republicans but ahead of Democrats, according to the Arizona secretary of state’s voter registration report. The Open Primaries Education Fund, a nonprofit organization that advocates for reform of the primary election system, projects this trend to continue and for independents and third-party voters to reach 43 percent of the state voting population by 2036.
Hugh McNichol is one of many veterans who identify themselves as independent. According to a March 2020 Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America member survey, 41 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans identify as an independent or third-party voter, 36 percent as Republican and 22 percent as Democrat.
McNichol, who is a 39-year-old white man, resides in Lansing, Michigan, where he owned his own mechanic shop before being hired as a mechanic by Tesla. Prior to this, McNichol served as a mechanic in the U.S. Army for eight years and was stationed in Iraq from 2006 to 2007. McNichol says he voted for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein in 2016 and Libertarian Gary Johnson in 2020, because they didn’t support the Iraq War.
“Veterans are realizing that neither one of the major parties have our best interests at heart,” McNichol told Truthout. “The vast majority of people in our country don’t care about what’s going over there…. But the politicians who sent us over there, they should be obligated to us, they should be obligated to those people there too. And I don’t feel like they held up their promises in either case.”
McNichol started to observe that promises to build infrastructure in Iraq turned into profits for private contractors, particularly for Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), which received $39.5 billion in war-related contracts. Dick Cheney was the chairman and CEO of former KBR parent company Halliburton until he became George W. Bush’s vice president in 2001.
“While I was there, I started hearing things like KBR gets $100 for a bag of laundry, KBR gets $100 for a plate of food, $6 for a can of soda, all these inflated expenses. And they weren’t keeping their promises of getting the infrastructure back up and running,” McNichol said.
Like McNichol, some veterans of the Afghanistan War report they feel as if they broke a promise to Afghans when U.S. troops withdrew from the country. Meanwhile, when McNichol returned home, he found the Department of Veterans Affairs inundated and unprepared to help returning soldiers.
McNichol worries about the lack of affordable housing and pollution in Lansing’s water sources. For years, the city has given tax cuts and subsidies to General Motors (GM), which polluted Lansing’s groundwater with dioxane, an industrial chemical that GM uses to clean oil off car parts. The pollution was discovered after the Revitalizing Auto Communities Environmental Response Trust was established by the federal government to take over the GM sites following the company’s bankruptcy in 2009. Earlier this year, GM announced it would invest $7 billion in manufacturing sites across Michigan. In Lansing, GM would partner with LG Energy Solution to spend $2.6 billion to build a new battery cell plant in Lansing and offer 1,700 new jobs to the area.
However, McNichol is wary about the long-term impact. “These toxins from the GM plans are still not cleaned up. They have no plans. The politicians in Lansing don’t care. They just want GM to come back again,” McNichol said.
Independent voters Truthout interviewed described a “rigged electoral system.” Despite the growing numbers of independents and third-party voters from diverse demographic and ideological groups, these voters face hurdles at the ballot box. Twenty-three U.S. states — including the battleground states of Arizona, Florida and Pennsylvania — have closed presidential primaries. Fifteen states, including Florida and Pennsylvania, have closed congressional and state primaries. Thirty states — including Arizona, Florida and Pennsylvania — require voters to declare a party affiliation upon registration. Those registered as independents are thus excluded from the two major parties’ closed primary elections, which, according to data from Ballotpedia, determines 35 percent of state legislative elections. In 11 states, more than half of all state legislative seats did not have major party competition in 2020. Registering with the two major parties often dictates the drawing of electoral districts, and poll workers are often only chosen from voters who register with the two major parties.
Advocacy groups such as Independent Voting and Open Primaries Education Fund want to see voter registration without party affiliation, nonpartisan primary elections and a restructuring of the Federal Election Commission to ensure nonpartisan election operations. According to the National League of Cities, 73 percent of the largest cities in the country already hold nonpartisan municipal elections.
“Independents began to see that the control of the electoral process by the two parties was fused with the larger economic and social circumstances in the country,” said Jacqueline Salit, president of IndependentVoting.org. “They began to feel that this was a country being run by a set of insiders, that the insiders had control over the political apparatus, and that unless and until we could change and transform the political apparatus, we weren’t going to be able to address issues of economic instability.”
Beyond open primaries, those interviewed support electoral reform measures, such as independent redistricting and having the top two or top four winners from primary elections compete in general elections. California, Washington State, Alaska, Nebraska and Louisiana already have such a system. Others support ranked choice voting, already adopted in 23 jurisdictions.
In Florida, for all the mainstream media talk of Latinos shifting their loyalties to the Republican Party after Trump made gains among Latino voters in Arizona, Texas and Florida in 2020, the data on independents present a less certain picture. According to the Florida Department of State’s October 2020 voter registration records, 36.5 percent of Latinos in the state registered as a third-party member or unaffiliated, behind Democrats and well ahead of Republicans. Data from earlier this year show independents now make up 28.7 percent of all registered voters statewide. If this trend continues, the state’s independent and third-party voters will exceed Republicans and Democrats by 2035.
Jose Torres, who is 65 years old, identifies as Hispanic, and lives in Jacksonville, Florida, begrudgingly voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, Andrew Gillum for governor in 2018 and Biden for president in 2020. Torres describes himself as economically conservative and socially liberal. He identifies as an independent and advocates for open primary elections in Florida because he is tired of having to vote for the “lesser of two evils.”
“The Democrats have taken Hispanic voters for granted for 20 years. We are not monolithic,” Torres told Truthout.
Torres says that Republicans were able to use anti-communist rhetoric to make gains among Cubans in South Florida. Even though he doesn’t buy into this rhetoric, Torres says that the Democratic Party has also failed to address issues of concern to him: high prescription drug prices, stagnant state minimum wages and climate change, citing rising sea levels that threaten to immerse parts of Miami two feet underwater within the next 40 years.
Young first-generation Latino-American voters have even less affiliation to either of the major parties. According to the Open Primaries Education Fund report, 60 percent of Latinos in the U.S. are under the age of 35 and over 50 percent of Latino millennials are independents.
Dariel Cruz Rodriguez, currently a 17-year-old senior at Colonial High School in Orlando, Florida, will vote for the first time this year. Rodriguez identifies as an independent. He said he will probably vote for Democrats this year, because of the state’s Republican-dominated legislature’s efforts to restrict voting rights, but he is also frustrated with the Democrats and the Biden administration.
“I supported Joe Biden, mainly because I wanted to get the other guy out. But Biden made a lot of promises on the campaign trail, and failed to follow through with a lot of them, especially on student loan forgiveness, which is really important to me and a lot of my other classmates,” Rodriguez told Truthout.
Besides student loan forgiveness, Rodriguez wants to see the government address climate change and improve public transit. He also opposes Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which recently passed the State House Legislature.
“Politicians are using Florida’s children and students as playing cards in the state legislature,” Rodriguez said.
Originally from the city of Ludowici in southern Georgia, Ron Dumas, a 23-year-old Black man, is currently finishing up his bachelor’s degree at the University of North Carolina in Asheville. He is majoring in ethics because, as he states, “I care about what is right.”
Dumas describes his hometown in Georgia as lacking in educational opportunities and job mobility: “I always say that there’s just a gas station and a high school in Ludowici.” Ludowici, with a population of 2,442, according to 2020 census figures, is 56 percent white and 36 percent African American, and votes largely conservative. Dumas says the Democrats “abandoned the community when they believed they couldn’t compete for the vote.”
Dumas’s mom is a medical assistant and his stepfather a veteran and truck driver. He recalls being 9 years old when his mom allowed him to stay up late to watch Barack Obama’s 2008 inauguration ceremony. It was the first time his parents had ever voted — his mom told him she didn’t vote in 2004 because “it would not have mattered.”
Dumas voted for the first time in 2020, supporting Bernie Sanders in the primaries. He noted that there was less excitement among his peers when Biden had become the Democratic nominee.
Dumas’s and Rodriguez’s sentiments echo the findings of a September 2020 survey conducted by Politico among Gen Z voters. Almost half of the Gen Z respondents reported they voted more against Trump, rather than for Biden. Forty-two percent of the poll’s Gen Z respondents identify as independent, 39 percent as Democrats and 20 percent as Republican.
“There is a consensus that people are tired of polarization and tired of the sort of politics where you’re always voting against something and never for something,” Dumas said. He wants to see Biden follow through with his promises on voting rights legislation, affordable health care, affordable child care, affordable housing and passing the Build Back Better plan.
While on the campaign trail, Biden ignited backlash and had to apologize to Black voters when he said, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me, or Trump, then you ain’t Black.” But more than a quarter of Black voters registered as independent and may be looking for an alternative to both major parties. Since last April, the president’s approval rating has declined from 83 percent to 64 percent among Black voters.
Like Dumas, Jarrell Corley, a 35-year-old Black man, emphasizes that Black voters are not a monolith and that there are more than two sides to an issue.
Corley identifies as an independent because he says he is tired of seeing nothing change for the Black community under Republican or Democratic administrations. He voted for Clinton in 2016, but did not vote in the 2020 presidential election, saying, “There was no point in voting. I didn’t have a dog in the fight.”
Corley is originally from Chicago. He cites that in most urban centers with large Black populations, local governments are dominated by the Democrats, but conditions, including displacement and police brutality, are getting worse.
“The only reason Black people don’t feel comfortable voting for Republicans is because the Democrats are a mouthpiece for the issues of Black people. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything is getting done,” Corley told Truthout. “If you look into all these major cities run by Democrats, what’s going on? Gentrification. They’re displacing poor, marginalized groups of people for new high economic development. So you may talk about progress and police brutality and all these issues, but what are you really doing? It’s all a facade. Using Black tragedy as a means to galvanize power.”
At the University of Wisconsin (UW) in Madison, Sam Clayton, a 21-year-old white student, studies horticulture. Clayton is nonbinary, using they/them pronouns, and is the treasurer of the campus’s chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America. Clayton recently led the UW-Madison local chapter to work with other organizations to stop a city attempt to shut down homeless encampments in Madison’s Reindahl Park and instead helped push the city to use federal COVID relief money to construct shelters there instead.
Clayton said they voted for Biden in 2020 out of “duress” and with “no excitement,” and has not seen any improvement in their material conditions.
Millennials were reported to be the first generation to do worse economically than their parents, a trend that has continued for Gen Z as housing and college costs soar. Clayton describes how their parents paid off college expenses and bought their first home by the time they were in their 20s. “It’s generally hard for young people to imagine a good future. And the Democrats don’t inspire much confidence in anything other than the status quo,” Clayton said. “The Democrats rely on this assumption that because they’re using progressive language, that’ll translate into youth voters. But more and more people that I talk to, even folks who are not politically inclined, don’t like what’s going on. The phrase ‘settled’ encompasses how people feel about voting for Democrats.”
While Politico reported that young voters are less likely than registered voters of all other age groups to consider voting impactful, they are just as likely to believe they can affect politics and political affairs. Young voters are more likely to support protests than older voters. Millennial and Gen Z voters interviewed for this article expressed a distrust of the government to address the country’s problems, and believe they must rely on their communities instead.
Clayton is worried about rising temperatures, housing prices, utility bills and student loans. As a nonbinary person, they do not feel they would be safe under a Republican administration, but believes that the Democrats may lose in 2022 and even in 2024 because young people are not relying on the electoral system to affect change.
“I think the Democrats have done a very good job of turning young people off from voting because they haven’t done much for us,” said Clayton. “But there is an increase in people’s political militancy and political agitation in terms of protesting, not necessarily just at the ballot box.”
In Pennsylvania, which holds closed presidential, congressional and state primaries, several bills to open up primary elections have stalled in the state government. According to January 2022 voter registration data from the Pennsylvania Department of State, 14.8 percent of voters registered as unaffiliated or “other.”
Third-party or independent candidates lack access to voter rolls and funding that the two major parties have. Furthermore, they often face legal challenges from the two parties who fear a third-party candidate will draw voters away from them or “spoil” their race.
Matt Nemeth, a 27-year-old white man and chair of the Green Party Allegheny chapter in Pennsylvania, regrets his vote for Clinton in 2016 and expresses frustration with the argument that their members are “spoiling” the vote, as both Clinton and Trump “serve private interests.”
Nemeth’s parents voted for Trump twice because he promised to bring manufacturing jobs back to Pennsylvania. Nemeth, on the other hand, says that manufacturing jobs should not come at the cost of corporate accountability and clean air, a promise he believes that both Democrats and Republicans have not delivered on.
Last year, U.S. Steel canceled plans for a $1.5 billion upgrade to bring three plants in Pennsylvania’s Monongahela Valley up to health department regulations. The regulations were implemented after two fires erupted, releasing benzene and hydrogen sulfide into the air and causing asthma-related emergency visits among residents. While the plants currently remain idle, U.S. Steel is challenging the Allegheny Health Department’s regulations.
“Both parties made promises that they don’t want to keep or can’t keep, and then every four years, we switch to another party, and the cycle repeats,” Nemeth told Truthout.
If the voices of this growing group of independents and third-party voters are excluded or unheeded, it could spell further volatility in our elections in the coming years.
In Chattanooga, Tennessee, independent Amber Hysell, a 37-year-old white woman, is making another bid for a seat in the state’s 3rd Congressional District. Hysell is a working mom still paying off student loans for a college accounting degree she was unable to finish when her financial aid ran out with only two classes left to take. For much of her adult life, she worked graveyard shifts in service and retail jobs so that she could have time to spend with her child during the day.
Fed up with issues of concern to her being overlooked — wealth inequality, child care, health care, underfunded schools and affordable housing — Hysell decided to run for Congress. When she was courted by the Hamilton County Democrats in 2020, she was given a Democratic strategy book from the 1970s.
“The way they described how a campaign is supposed to work, it made me feel like they didn’t realize they were in Tennessee, that they were just incredibly out of touch with the problems in this district and in this state. It really did not seem to me to have an actual plan or the actual desire to win down here,” Hysell told Truthout.
As an independent, Hysell doesn’t automatically get access to voter contact information or funding sources as candidates from the two major parties do. But when asked why she was bothering to run when there were so many hurdles, Hysell replies: “Life is going to be difficult for the next generation. We’re not addressing climate change. We’re not addressing inequality in any meaningful way. Republicans and Democrats are two sides of the same coin and neither one of them is paying the bills. They have created a system that blockades anyone who doesn’t fall on one side or the other. And the best thing that I can do for my kid is do whatever I can to change that outcome.”
The Arizona Senate on Wednesday passed a Republican-authored bill that advocates warn could prompt “the most extreme voter purge in the country” by requiring state residents to retroactively provide proof of citizenship to stay on the rolls.
Marilyn Rodriguez, founder of the Arizona-based firm Creosote Partners, argued in a Twitter thread that H.B. 2492 is a “monumentally terrible attack on our elections.”
“Take the proof of citizenship requirement for voter registration, which was adopted in ’04. By making this a requirement for voters, this bill would retroactively apply it to the millions of AZ voters registered before the proof of citizenship law took effect 18 years ago,” Rodriguez explained. “Arizona is the only state in the nation with a documentary proof of citizenship requirement currently in force, but it exempts previously registered voters. But this bill would do away with that protection.”
Without intervention by the Arizona Supreme Court, Rodriguez continued, “the clear language here means that to be eligible to vote — regardless of when you registered — you need to have shown proof of citizenship.”
“Imagine how many of Arizona’s 4.35 million registered voters would be immediately forced off the rolls or given just 30 days to provide proof of their citizenship, such as a birth or naturalization certificate,” she wrote. “This is a recipe for chaos, not election integrity, and it would likely cut the state’s electorate in half overnight. If Arizona proceeds with this bill, it will draw numerous lawsuits and be in lonely, uncharted waters defending the indefensible.”
Just one of a slew of voter suppression measures that the GOP-controlled Arizona legislature is currently working to advance — including a bill to abolish early voting — H.B. 2492 now heads to Republican Gov. Doug Ducey’s desk, having passed the state House last month along party lines.
Arizona, which President Joe Biden carried narrowly in 2020, emerged as a flashpoint in efforts by former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies to overturn the election results.
Following the November 2020 presidential contest, state Republicans fueled by Trump’s baseless claims of fraud hired the now-defunct firm Cyber Ninjas to conduct an audit of ballots in the state’s most populous county. The review ultimately found that Biden won the election.
But Arizona Republicans, as evidenced by H.B. 2492 and other legislation, have yet to abandon their unfounded narrative that the state’s election system is riddled with unlawful voting and “foreign interference.”
“A group of Arizona legislators continue to directly attack democracy and voting rights using every tool at their disposal,” Alex Gulotta, Arizona state director of All Voting Is Local, said in a statement Wednesday. “Ducey must veto H.B. 2492, which creates illegal barriers to voting for the people of Arizona by imposing improper requirements on voter registration.”
Gulotta warned that the legislation, sponsored by state Rep. Jake Hoffman (R-12), requires “anyone who registered to vote before 2005 to provide additional documentation” and “targets voters born outside the United States for special scrutiny and investigation.”
“Bills like this one are being passed through the Arizona legislature to appease a small, but loud group of legislators who are basing their decisions on unfounded claims from the sham election review conducted by the discredited and defunct Cyber Ninjas,” said Gulotta. “This is the latest anti-voter measure from a group of legislators who are more interested in grabbing power than protecting the will of the people. Even though their own Senate rules attorney told them this bill was illegal, they continue to recklessly squander taxpayer money by provoking inevitable and expensive litigation.”
H.B. 2492 is one of more than 250 bills that state-level Republicans nationwide have introduced, pre-filed, or carried over into 2022 in an effort to restrict ballot access, according to the latest tally by the Brennan Center for Justice.
“Across the country, Republican state legislators are trying to purge voters and erect massive barriers to the ballot box in order to choose their voters and exclude everyone else,” said Christina Harvey, executive director of Stand Up America. “Arizona’s H.B. 2492 is one of the most egregious examples of anti-voter legislation being peddled by the GOP under the guise of election integrity.”
“But there’s no hiding their true intentions; this bill places a disproportionate — and often insurmountable — burden on older, minority, and low-income voters,” Harvey added. “A vote for H.B. 2492 is a vote to disenfranchise Arizonans. Governor Ducey must now decide whether he’s on the side of everyday Arizonans or the Republican legislators who are trying to silence their voices.”
BREAKING: In a sweeping victory for voting rights in Florida. Federal federal judge STRIKES DOWN key provisions of voters suppression law SB90. Congrats to our clients 
