Businesswoman Marjorie Greene triumphed over neurosurgeon John Cowan in a Republican runoff for Georgia’s 14th district Tuesday, clearing the path for her to become Congress’ first open supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Continue reading “QAnon Supporter Marjorie Greene Wins Runoff, Headed To Congress”
The State Department inspector general found in a report released Tuesday that the department did not “fully assess risks and implement mitigation measures to reduce civilian casualties and legal concerns” when it green-lit arms sales to Middle Eastern countries.
President Trump unsurprisingly slammed Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) shortly after the California senator was announced as Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s running mate in the November election, during a press conference at the White House on Tuesday afternoon.
Trump tore into Harris’ previous comments that were critical of Biden during the Democratic primary, and said that he was “a little surprised” that the former VP came around to choosing her as his running mate.
Although Trump claimed that Harris “was my number one draft pick,” he pointed out that she “did very, very poorly in the primaries” before repeatedly calling her “nasty” toward the end of the briefing.
The President first argued that Harris was “nasty” and “disrespectful” to Biden during the primary, citing how she criticized Biden during a primary debate last year for his record on bussing.
Trump then proceeded to take aim at Harris — who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee — for being “nasty” during then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing in 2018.
“I won’t forget that,” Trump said.
Follow TPM’s coverage of Trump’s press conference below:
The Trump campaign swiftly condemned Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s announcement of Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) as his running mate on Tuesday afternoon. Continue reading “Trump Camp Issues Irate Response To Biden Choosing Harris As Running Mate”
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) will be former Vice President Joe Biden’s running mate on the Democrats’ 2020 presidential ticket, Biden announced Tuesday.
Continue reading “Kamala Harris Will Be Dems’ Vice Presidential Pick, Biden Announces”
Arizona Sen. Martha McSally (R) said Tuesday that if Democrats managed to gain control of the White House, the Senate and the House in November, the party would legislate statehood to both Puerto Rico and D.C. — a move that she said would be disastrous for Republicans.
“They’re going to make D.C. and Puerto Rico a state and get four new Democrat Senators,” McSally told NBC News in an interview Tuesday. “We’d never get the Senate back again.”
Some have criticized McSally’s remarks as an implicit suggestion that voters in D.C. and Puerto Rico did not deserve the congressional representation of the 50 states.
The Republican senator’s comments come after the House voted in June, for the first time, to declare the city to be the nation’s 51st state, a milestone that backers say begins to challenge a long history of legislative injustice in the nation’s capital city. However, the effort faces impossible odds in the Senate.
McSally’s comments appear to mirror those of President Donald Trump, who suggested in May that maintaining a Republic majority was reason to continue to suppress representation for voters in Washington, D.C.
“D.C. will never be a state,” Trump told the New York Post during an interview in May. “You mean District of Columbia, a state? Why? So we can have two more Democratic — Democrat senators and five more congressmen? No, thank you. That’ll never happen.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) dismissed the proposal last year, saying that D.C.-statehood advocates are pushing an agenda of “full-bore socialism” to expand the Democratic caucus.
In a radio interview in 2018, Trump stood firm on an “absolute no” for Puerto Rico’s statehood, citing his ongoing feud with San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz who criticized his hurricane response.
Ironically, the current Puerto Rican delegate to Congress — resident commissioner Jenniffer Gonzalez — is a member of the Republic party.
McSally is considered among the most vulnerable GOP Senate incumbents facing re-election this year. Last week, she told local radio station KTAR News that the Arizona race “will decide the Senate majority,” adding with regards to her opponent former astronaut Mark Kelly that “Arizona voters deserve to know where he stands.”
She expanded on that point on Tuesday, telling NBC News that this year’s election was a “tipping point” and that if Democrats win the White House, the Senate and the House “they’re already saying they are going to ram through the most radical agenda we’ve seen in American history. That is out of step with Arizonans,” she said.
Last week we did our second Inside briefing since we came back from our COVID briefing hiatus. I spoke to Annette Gordon-Reed, one of the country’s preeminent Jefferson scholars and the author of two books about the Jefferson-Hemings family and the historical controversies surrounding it. Gordon-Reed is a professor at Harvard Law School and has a joint appointment in the History Department. Her 1997 book Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy was the first major scholarly work to take the existence of Jefferson’s mixed race family seriously. It came out only about a year before the matter was settled conclusively by DNA evidence. Before then it wasn’t universally rejected by historians but was treated as either unknowable or unlikely, an ancient calumny that played little part in the Jefferson biographical tradition. I was eager to discuss this until-recently hidden or denied part of America’s past with Gordon-Reed and get her perspective on how we should see Jefferson in this era of iconoclasm that has accelerated in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.
We’re publishing the discussion in its entirety for members. Watch after the jump.
Multiple judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit suggested Tuesday that the “integrity” of the judicial branch was at stake in the dispute between Michael Flynn and the judge presiding over Flynn’s case.
Continue reading “Appellate Judges To DOJ: Is Court’s ‘Integrity’ At Stake In Flynn Dispute?”
The Big Ten won’t be playing football this fall because of concerns about COVID-19.
The move comes six day after the conference that includes historic programs such as Ohio State, Michigan, Nebraska and Penn State had released a revised conference-only schedule that it hoped would help it navigate a fall season with potential COVID-19 disruptions.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has reportedly made a decision on who will appear on the ballot with him in the November election amid speculation that he will announce his running mate any moment. Continue reading “CNN: Biden Has Selected His Running Mate”
