The scandal involving New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and the George Washington Bridge is a complicated one. It has a long list of characters and a lot of moving parts. We’ve come up with some simple guides to help you navigate it.
For one, we’ve just published an updated list of the cast involved in the scandal. From Christie’s inner circle to some Jersey Democrats digging into it, these are the people who are making the governor’s life hell right now.
This could get fun fast. Former Gov. and now State Sen. Richard Codey (D) says “Democratic power brokers” have and still are trying to shut down the BridgeGate investigation.
It looks like we’re soon going to be living in a brave new world of more limited recess appointments.
This morning in oral arguments on the scope of the recess appointment power, the Supreme Court justices expressed deep skepticism about its use during pro forma recesses. Less clear was where the justices might come down on whether annual intra-session recesses count as a recess or on whether the vacancy must come open during the recess for the recess appointment to be valid. Those last two restrictions are where the appeals court really pushed the envelope in the case before the Supreme Court.
New Jersey lawmaker tried to alert Gov. Chris Christie on the bridge lane closures six days after they reopened. Read the letter.
In case you (wisely) dropped out of BridgGate over the weekend, let me update you on some new developments. The upshot of Friday’s massive document dump was that it didn’t produce any one smoking gun type email like the one that got Bridget Kelly fired. What it did do was paint a pretty clear picture of lots of Christie’s staffers, appointees and associates involved if not in planning the Bridge shutdown then in working to cover it up after the fact. (Here’s our look at the big four unanswered questions as of right now.) But the real change, I think, is a change of what the key question is driving the reporting.
Here are the four big questions hanging above Gov. Chris Christie and the bridge scandal.
Fox’s Brit Hume: Christie Too ‘Tough’ for Today’s ‘Feminized Atmosphere’. Watch.
Demos’ Tova Andrea Wang: New research on Voter ID laws “found in those states where minority turnout rose from the prior presidential election and where there were a larger percentage of minority voters in the years 2006 to 2011, the number of laws restricting voting rights proposed by lawmakers also went up.”
ICYMI yesterday, Brian Murphy’s close look at the billion dollar development project that might be at the heart of the BridgGate scandal.
[THIS POSITION HAS BEEN FILLED.]
We’re looking for a web designer to join our team for a very specific and important job. The job title is Front End Web Designer. And that’s a pretty good description. But I really want to find just the right person for this position because it’s critical to the very ambitious plans we have for this year. If it might be you or if you might know someone who’s a fit, I really hope you’ll get in touch with me.
To date, whether we’ve had one, two or three techs working at TPM we’ve generally taken a “full stack” approach. Each member of the team has a hand in programming and front end design and everything in between. But with our goals this year we’re taking a different approach – two programmers focused on building out our new publishing platform and a third focused on front end design.