When I got interested in taking a second look at some of the many school boards that were taken over by far-right “anti-woke” activists in 2022, it was hard to know where to start. You know about threesomer and Moms for Liberty Cofounder Bridget Ziegler and “Cool Mom” Clarice Schillinger, who will soon stand trial for the underage keggers she allegedly held in her home before decking various high school students who left too early. But there are so many other cases across the country. Most examples aren’t so lurid, eye-popping or hilarious. But they give those high flyers a run for their money. There is a common theme. It’s not all right-wing politics and bans on transgender students in sports. There is also a common pattern of taking over school boards and then pulling up stakes from the mundane but critical task of overseeing local public schools and instead refashioning the office into what amounts to a jurisdictional castle from which traditionalist culture warriors sally forth into the local community on various right-wing power trips, usually spending tons of money and violating numerous laws in the process.
Continue reading “A Small Nevada County Finally Got a Wartime School Board”Listen To This: The 213th Democrat
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss Tom Suozzi’s win in the special election to replace George Santos, the Hur report heard ’round the world and Mike Johnson’s foreign aid pickle.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
TPM on The Case
You see there to the right (if you’re reading TPM on a desktop computer) our live blogging of the fairly surreal hearing today in the Fulton County prosecution of Donald Trump. This is the one dealing with claims of wrongdoing tied to prosecutor Fani Willis’s relationship with fellow prosecutor Nathan Wade. See that here. But I wanted to make sure you saw the third and final installment of our series on the Ken Chesebro document trove. The third installment goes into new detail on the lawyer/conspirators’ efforts to game out which members of the Supreme Court were most likely to go along with their plot to steal the presidential election. As you might expect, Thomas and Alito come in for special consideration.
Continue reading “TPM on The Case”Jack Smith Urges SCOTUS To Stay Out Of Trump’s Immunity Case
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Decision Time
In a new filing late Wednesday, Special Counsel Jack Smith got his first shot at Trump’s effort to persuade the Supreme Court to consider his claims of absolute presidential immunity from criminal prosecution.
With veteran Supreme Court advocate Michael Dreeben on the brief, Smith presented an elegant and economical argument against Trump’s unprecedented and ahistorical bid for presidential immunity.
But the brief was more notable for what it was trying to steer the justices toward: not taking up the case at all. By reinforcing and amplifying the unanimous DC Circuit decision against Trump, Smith tried to offer the high court the easiest off ramp of all. If the justices decide not to take the case, the appeals court ruling stands and the case immediately goes back to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan to set a new trial date for Trump.
I remain skeptical that the Supreme Court will pass entirely on the case, but I’m less skeptical than I was. The appeals court opinion was strong, unanimous, and clearly designed to give the Supreme Court few loose edges to grab ahold of. It was from that position of strength that Smith urged the justices to let the appeals court decision stand as a formidable statement on the law, the framework of the Constitution, and history.
In the alternative, Smith argued that if the Supreme Court wants to take the case it should treat Trump’s original filing last week as a request to do so (so far Trump has only asked the Supreme Court to pause the underlying proceedings while he prepares to ask it to take up the case) and expedite a briefing and argument schedule that would still allow the trial to take place before the November election.
Indeed, timing was the real subtext of the Smith brief. The window for getting a trial in before Election Day is narrowing dangerously, and Smith kept hammering home the need for a prompt resolution to the matter:
[T]he public interest in a prompt trial is at its zenith where, as here, a former President is charged with conspiring to subvert the electoral process so that he could remain in office. The Nation has a compelling interest in seeing the charges brought to trial.
Smith’s filing was ahead of schedule; it wasn’t due until Tuesday. Trump will likely file a reply in the coming days. No fixed timetable for when the Supreme Court will render its decision, but I would be surprised if we don’t get something from the court by the end of next week.
Trump In Court Today
Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s hush money prosecution of Donald Trump is coming back to life with a hearing scheduled for 9:30 ET this morning with the trial judge. Among the issues expected to come up at the hearing:
- Trump’s bid to dismiss the indictment;
- firming up the trial date, currently March 25; and
- various other pretrial matters, including the mechanics of jury selection.
Trump is expected to attend in person.
Duly Noted
With the criminal cases bearing down on him, Trump is reviving his calls for the House GOP to impeach Joe Biden.
Fani Willis In The Hot Seat
This morning, state Judge Scott McAfee will convene an evidentiary hearing in the Georgia RICO case on whether Atlanta DA Fani Willis should be disqualified from prosecuting the case.
This is the needlessly sordid matter involving Willis’ romantic relationship with a prosecutor she hired. The judge seems less interested in the romance than the claim Willis is improperly benefiting financially from the prosecution. It’s a stretch, but the judge has indicated that’s where his focus is.
Willis’ defense has placed considerable import on her claim that the relationship didn’t commence until after she hired the prosecutor. Whether that holds up to scrutiny (and the damage it will do to her credibility with the judge if it doesn’t) is what I’ll be keeping an eye on.
The hearing could stretch into tomorrow. We have a liveblog covering it for as long as it goes.
The Chesebro Docs
The final installment in TPM’s series on a trove of documents obtained by reporter Josh Kovensky in the Michigan fake electors investigation:
Ouch!
Punchbowl: The disaster that is the House Republican leadership
Tea-Leaf Reading In the NY-03
I’m a huge skeptic of immediate post-election analysis. It’s burdended by a lack of data, a surplus of partisan spin, competitive pressures to “explain” results, and groupthink. One tell: The tendency to land on single proximate cause for the result. With those caveats out of the way, here’s a taste of the post-election analysis in the NY-03 special election to replace George Santos:
- Semafor: Democrats think they’ve found a winning border message
- Aaron Blake: Suozzi gives Dems an immigration road map. It could be tough to follow.
- WaPo: Democrats see 2024 blueprint in N.Y. election that centered on immigration
- Politico: Some Democrats see an immigration blueprint in NY win. Progressives are worried.
Ain’t Nepotism Great?
With Lara Trump to be installed as RNC co-chairwoman, some Republicans are worried Donald Trump will once again start using party funds to pay his legal bills.
2024 Ephemera
- Rep. Mark Green (R-TN), the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee who just oversaw the bogus impeachment of DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, announced he will not run for re-election this year. Green is the fifth committee chair who has decided not to seek re-election this cycle.
- Michigan GOP chair officially ousted after weeks of chaos.
- AP: “Wisconsin’s GOP-controlled Legislature on Tuesday passed legislative maps that were proposed by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers — a move designed to prevent the liberal-controlled state Supreme Court from implementing maps that might be even worse for Republicans.”
- CA-22: Democrats find themselves in a messy primary battle for a swing seat that had been a potential pickup opportunity.
Matt Gaetz Pickup Lines: A Primer
The Valentine’s Day gift we all needed: Someone read to ABC News some of the Matt Gaetz texts obtained by the House Ethics Committee in its probe of the sex trafficking allegations against Gaetz that the feds declined to prosecute.
The man has such game:
- “Hey — any interest in flying on a private plane to the keys May 19-21?”
- “2 guys, 4 girls. A very high-quality adventurous group”
- “As is true with all time you spend w me, it’ll be fun and chill”
Aside from the cringe factor, ABC News describes the texts’ import in this way:
The messages, if accurate, mark the first known example of alleged direct private communication between the Florida congressman and a woman who his one-time close associate Joel Greenberg told investigators he had been paying to have sex with other men, according to documents and interviews with multiple sources.
The woman in question was underage at the time she was being paid by Greenberg to have sex with other adult men, but by the time of the Gaetz texts above she was over 21, according to the ABC News report.
Headline Of The Day
And the winner is: “Putin Trolls ‘Soft’ Tucker Carlson”
Credit to Politico Europe, which has a bit more edge than its domestic counterpart:
Of course, had Putin actually wanted to go toe-to-toe with a formidable opponent, the Kremlin wouldn’t have hand-picked Carlson for his first interview with a Western journalist since he launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Carlson, the famously Russia-friendly ex-Fox News host, is known more for a penchant for cozying up to autocrats than for probing reportage.
Sad Blast From The Past
Remember Rachel Dolezal, the white woman busted almost a decade ago for pretending to be Black? And when I say pretending to be Black, I’m not sure I’m doing it justice.
Dolezal was the head of the NAACP chapter in Spokane, Washington, and an African Studies professor. So she wasn’t just playing pretend in her own head, she was holding herself out in a very public way as a Black activist. It all came crashing down around her in spectacular fashion.
She popped up again this week, under a new name, when she lost her job with an Arizona school district after a local TV station found her OnlyFans account.
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Johnson Ignores Looming Funding Deadlines In Downplaying Dems’ New York Win
Tom Suozzi’s win in the New York 3rd Congressional District replacing serial fabulist George Santos Tuesday night will bring Republicans’ majority in the House down to 219-213 once the longtime New York Democrat is sworn in. The high-stakes congressional seat flip for Democrats means that Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) will only be able to lose two Republicans on any party-line vote with full attendance in coming weeks (Republicans still have two vacant seats left by ousted-Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Rep. Bill Johnson (R-OH) who resigned in January).
Continue reading “Johnson Ignores Looming Funding Deadlines In Downplaying Dems’ New York Win”NY3 Post-Game: It’s All Over But Deciding Why The Dem Win Doesn’t Matter
With the clear light of morning I wanted to do another after-action report on the results out of the special election in New York’s 3rd congressional district. According to the close-to-final results, former Rep. Tom Suozzi beat Mazi Pilip by eight percentage points, 54% to 46%. That is a decisive if not a huge margin.
Continue reading “NY3 Post-Game: It’s All Over But Deciding Why The Dem Win Doesn’t Matter”The Supreme Pressure Campaign
Donald Trump’s attorneys in 2020 thought that they had one advantage which nobody — not the Democrats, not lower-court judges, not Congress — could outmatch: the Supreme Court.
At their most feverish, attorneys for Trump believed that the Supreme Court could eventually be bullied into declaring Joe Biden the loser of the 2020 election and Trump the winner. They deployed a series of strategies, detailed in a trove of documents given to Michigan prosecutors by attorney Ken Chesebro, aimed at stoking a chaotic stalemate in Congress, thereby forcing the Court to act.
The same set of real-time emails and texts between Trump campaign officials and attorneys also shows how the group sought to influence individual justices as they filed lawsuits seeking to overturn Biden’s victory in several swing states. In the trove, attorneys game out which justices would view their claims most favorably, and speculate over how certain claims or lawsuits could create pressure to build a majority on the court.
At times, the Trump attorneys recognized that their play for the Supreme Court was a Hail Mary. It’s from that desperation, the documents suggest, that the push for chaos and delay emerged — a nearly hopeless quest to leave the Supreme Court as the only actor left standing, with Congress buckling under procedural radicalism.
But at other points, the lawyers seemed deadly serious in their speculation. John Eastman, the law professor, wrote in one email that he believed the Supreme Court would probably agree to invalidate Pennsylvania Supreme Court decisions about the election, but that the justices were “likely grappling with” the question of what “remedy” to provide. Chief Justice John Roberts would want “to account for the riots angle if they go our way,” Eastman imagined.
This story largely plays out in the final weeks before Jan. 6, after the Trump campaign had finished convening slates of its own, fake presidential electors who were willing to cast ballots saying Trump, not Biden, had won their state. To the Trump campaign, that scheme, too, was a means to theorize the high court into wrenching states that it lost away from Biden. As Chesebro wrote in late November to several attorneys working on the campaign’s effort to invalidate the Wisconsin result, the point of convening fake electors would be “to benefit from an eventual U.S. Supreme Court ruling” voiding the election result, allowing the Trump electors to swoop in and replace the Biden electors from their state in the Electoral College.
But it wasn’t until mid December, after the fake electors were sworn in — and after the Supreme Court signaled that it would not help the Trump campaign, rejecting on Dec. 11 a lawsuit filed by the state of Texas — that conversations about how to exert pressure on the justices began to accelerate.
The New York Times reported on one of the emails obtained by TPM, in which Chesebro cited “wild chaos” as potentially forcing the Court to act, and another in which he stated that the question of whether to bring suits before the Court was “political.”
The trove of documents obtained by TPM paints a fuller picture. TPM obtained the documents after Michigan prosecutors with Attorney General Dana Nessel (D)’s office sent out a tranche of records provided by Chesebro as part of his cooperation with their investigation. Chesebro supplied the documents, which include emails, texts, and legal memos, to prosecutors. The records do not provide a comprehensive accounting of the Trump campaign’s entire effort to reverse the President’s loss; they reflect what Chesebro provided as he sought to avoid further prosecution.
The documents provide new details about and insights into the Trump campaign’s legal maneuvering before Jan. 6, a story we told in part I and part II of this series. They tell another story, too: how a group of attorneys for the Trump campaign, including Chesebro, sought to use lawsuits before the Court to advance their goal of reversing Trump’s loss, including by:
- Filing lawsuits before SCOTUS challenging the results in enough states to create the impression that more electoral votes were still in play than the margin by which Trump lost
- Forcing SCOTUS to step in by causing a stalemate in Congress on Jan. 6
- Bringing enough lawsuits to SCOTUS so as to pressure friendly justices to act more aggressively
The story picks up in the weeks after the election, when the Trump campaign filed lawsuits across the country, seeking to invalidate or overturn the results in several states. They lost in nearly every case that they brought, and saw dozens more lawsuits dismissed. As time ran out, they had to decide: Which cases should they continue to pursue through appeals to the Supreme Court?
At first, they focused on two lawsuits, one challenging the results in Pennsylvania and another in Wisconsin.
Chesebro had entered the Trump campaign’s legal world via his work on the Wisconsin case, which the state Supreme Court dismissed on Dec. 14. On Christmas Eve 2020, Chesebro found himself trying to persuade Trump campaign officials to give the green light on asking the Supreme Court to intervene in the matter.
Bruce Marks, a lawyer and former politician from Pennsylvania, was counsel, along with John Eastman, on a lawsuit the Trump campaign had filed asking the Supreme Court to hear a case that sought to reverse the result in Pennsylvania.
Marks had his own unique background: in the early 1990s, he lost a state Senate race, only to have a federal judge overturn the result and order him into office upon a finding of massive fraud in the election.
Marks’ story became a north star of Trump’s legal efforts in 2020, serving as an example of what the courts had the power to do, if they only had the will.
On the morning of Dec. 24, Trump campaign official Justin Clark emailed Marks, Chesebro, and other attorneys with an inquiry: If they brought their cases to the Supreme Court, what did they think the odds of winning were? And how much would pursuing the Wisconsin case before SCOTUS cost?
Marks replied that he believed bringing cases from additional states — including Wisconsin — before the Supreme Court would help his Pennsylvania case.
“While it is difficult to estimate success on Cert petitions, the success of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are intertwined,” Marks wrote to the group, copying Eastman on the exchange. “Wisconsin is an important step to getting to challenging 37 electoral votes.”
“Odds?” Eastman chimed in, responding to Clark’s request. He gave them odds: 10-20 percent that the Court would take the Pennsylvania case; “having Wisconsin in probably pushes that more towards the 20% side of the range or higher.”
“Odds of the Wisconsin case getting granted? ZERO if we don’t file,” Eastman added.
It was a carpe diem approach to seeking review from the Supreme Court, and one echoed by Chesebro, who wrote 10 minutes later that “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” and that he would defer to Eastman’s “personal insight” into which justices were the most distressed by the Trump campaign’s claims.
“A campaign that believes it really won the election would file a petition as long as it’s plausible and the resource constraints aren’t too great,” Chesebro wrote.
This intersected directly with the Trump campaign’s quest to find 270 electoral votes using non-electoral means. As Eastman wrote in a message a couple of hours later, a lawsuit to overturn the results in Arizona and Bruce Marks’ suit in Pennsylvania had already been filed before the Supreme Court — 31 electoral votes out of Biden’s lead of 36. Eastman wrote that Wisconsin, with 10 electoral votes, was “the most viable option to fill this gap.”
Earlier on in the Christmas Eve exchange, Wisconsin attorney and former judge Jim Troupis had warned the group: The path to success was “unclear” and “ill-defined.” The attorneys, he wrote, should be concerned about the “obligations” that come with asking the Supreme Court to hear a case. “I have made clear from the outset that I would strongly oppose any Petition where the goal is purely political,” Troupis wrote in an attachment cited by Chesebro.
“I don’t disagree with Judge Troupis’s comments here,” Chesebro replied, before going on to sketch out a theory over several emails throughout the day, proposing a plan to pressure the Supreme Court to overturn the election: the campaign could file enough Supreme Court cases to persuade the justices that they held the power to “change the electoral outcome.”
“Why intervene if it can make no difference in the end,” he wrote, apparently channelling what he hoped enough justices would come to believe. In a separate message that same day, Chesebro suggested to the group that Trump should file the lawsuit to sway internal Court politics, saying “getting this on file gives more ammo to the justices fighting for the Court to intervene,” he wrote.
Eastman wrote that he believed the campaign was on solid legal ground, and so the odds were based not on “the legal merits, but an assessment of the Justices’ spines,” before exhorting the group to help the justices who were “willing to do their duty” by filing the Wisconsin case.
After more back-and-forth, Eastman shared the theory that Chief Justice Roberts would likely be concerned, if the Court ruled in favor of Trump, about “the riots angle” — a premonition of what might come after handing Trump an election he lost.
Clark, the campaign official, wrote in to the sprawling thread two hours after Eastman’s “riots” email with some skepticism: he said that the campaign wouldn’t pay the attorneys “unless we get some wins,” and, worse for Chesebro and Eastman, that his impression was that the odds of success in Wisconsin were zero. He also echoed Chesebro’s theory that, if the election certification in Congress could be derailed, Jan. 6 could extend for days, writing “it also sounds like Jan 6 is a hard deadline for legal recourse unless congress doesn’t count the votes one way or another.”
The campaign eventually assented. On Dec. 29, Rudy Giuliani sent a certification authorizing the attorneys to ask the Supreme Court to hear the Wisconsin case.
The Trump attorneys were also reviewing the option of Georgia. At 16 electoral votes, it was a potentially lucrative prize to be stolen; but as Eastman had written in the Wisconsin thread, the campaign’s lawsuit in the state was “stuck in a quagmire with the state trial courts not even assigning a judge” to consider it.
The group decided to file a federal version of the Georgia lawsuit, seeing it as a way to get around what they regarded as an infuriating cold shoulder from the state judiciary. But a question continued to hang over their efforts, even as they continued into 2021: What was the point?
The attorneys had to keep themselves going — every day that the Supreme Court continued to ignore their filings was a reminder of just how unlikely their success was. Marks, the Pennsylvania attorney, wrote an email to attorneys involved in the Georgia case on New Years Eve asking if the federal judge could issue an injunction allowing the state legislature to appoint the Trump electors.
Chesebro replied within minutes that he saw an added benefit with Marks’ gambit: Georgia federal courts are in the 11th Circuit, which is overseen by Justice Clarence Thomas.
Again, Chesebro wrote, the point was to make a statement via the Court.
“Merely having this case pending in the Supreme Court, not ruled on, might be enough to delay consideration of Georgia, particularly if Pence has the legal ability and will to insert himself at least enough to win delay,” he wrote. “Realistically, our only chance to get a favorable judicial opinion by Jan. 6, which might hold up the Georgia count in Congress, is from Thomas — do you agree, Prof. Eastman?”
“I think I agree,” Eastman replied. All the Court needed to give was a “likely,” he wrote — some suggestion that a ruling which signaled some chance of winning down the line might be enough. After all, Eastman said, he was talking to Georgia lawmakers and Jan. 6 was one week away: all they needed was a small push to decertify Biden’s win in the state before the big day.
By that point, the emails suggest, even the most optimistic Trump attorneys were losing hope of a clear-cut win before the Supreme Court. In talking points for members of Congress emailed among Clark and the attorneys on New Year’s day, Eastman added rhetoric to that effect.
“The Supreme Court has made it clear that it has no intention of addressing this illegal and unconstitutional conduct,” he wrote. “So upholding the rule of law now falls to other constitutional actors who have constitutionally assigned roles.
At this point,” he concluded, “the best we can likely hope for is a strident dissent from Thomas or Alito that maps out the illegal conduct and the constitutional actors who can provide a remedy.”
Congrats On Your Bogus Impeachment, Champ
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
An Abuse Of Power
The GOP-led House finally got its act together enough to stage an impeachment performance last evening, claiming the scalp of Biden Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
The same three Republican members who stymied the effort last week voted against impeachment again, but Rep. Steve Scalise’s return from cancer treatment gave the Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) the critical vote he needed to complete the flimsiest impeachment in history:
- no claims of high crimes or misdemeanors;
- no evidence of wrongdoing or graft;
- no shame in using impeachment to salve the hurt feelings of Donald Trump over his two impeachments and to boost Republicans’ signature election year issue:
immigrationxenophobia.
It’s totally appropriate to categorize these kinds of maneuvers by Republicans as performative or as playing politics or as engaging in political stunts. All true. But it’s also fundamentally an abuse of power. House Republicans are hikacking the levers of power that come with the offices they hold to advance their own partisan political aims and hold on to that power.
Not every example of an alignment between official acts and partisan political advantage is an abuse of power. But when you strip away any ostensibly objective motive for the official act, when you offer no pretense for the official act, when you’re only using the powers of the office to further your own political aims, when you stretch the law and the rules and bend them to your own grubby ends, you’re engaged in abuse of power. When, at the same time, you’re engaging in the wholesale breaking of government and institutions for the sake of it, all you’re left with is politics of the grimy, self-serving, and self-perpetuating variety.
A few additional notes:
- Impeachment is dead in the Senate: The Democratic-controlled Senate is not going to muster a two-thirds vote to to convict Mayorkas and the proceedings may be truncated to save time.
- Senate tied up: By rule, the impeachment trial will be the only Senate floor business until it is complete. It’s not exactly clear how that will dovetail with avoiding a government shutdown or dealing with any foreign aid bill that the House might kick its way.
- For the history nerds: You may see Mayorkas’ impeachment described as both the first impeachment of a cabinet officer since 1876 and the first impeachment of a sitting cabinet officer ever. Both are true. William W. Belknap, secretary of war under Ulysses S. Grant was impeached by the House on March 2, 1876, but he had already tendered his resignation to Grant that morning, and Grant had accepted it. So unlike Mayorkas, Belknap was no longer in office when he was impeached.
Good Read
NYT: On Capitol Hill, Republicans Use Bigoted Attacks Against Political Foes
Pot Meet Kettle
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ), one of the Senate negotiators on the failed Ukraine aid-border package, became so frustrated with Sen. Lindsey Graham’s shifting demands that she referred to him privately as a “chaos monster,” the WaPo reports.
Quote Of The Day
At the NATO summit in 2018, [Trump] came very close to withdrawing from NATO right there at the summit. So each of these comments, as he makes them now over six years, to me simply reinforces that the notion of withdrawing from NATO is very serious with him. People say, “Well, he’s not really serious. He’s negotiating with NATO.” Look, I was there when he almost withdrew, and he’s not negotiating — because his goal here is not to strengthen NATO, it’s to lay the groundwork to get out.
Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton
Biden Condemns Trump’s Anti-NATO Remarks
In a White House appearance, President Biden blasted Trump for abandoning NATO to Putin: “Can you imagine a former president of United States saying that? The whole world heard it,” Biden said. “No other president in our history has ever bowed down to a Russian dictator. Well, let me say this as clearly as I can: I never will. For God’s sake, it’s dumb. It’s shameful. It’s dangerous. It’s un-American.”
aNalySIs
May history not judge us only by the worst headlines of our era:
In case you had any doubt what is at stake in this election, the lede makes it clear:
It was always headed here, with President Joe Biden in his 80s and Donald Trump not far behind. But in the span of a few days, the wrinkled and sagging reality staring the nation in the face has become the defining issue of the 2024 campaign.
It’s certainly what we all remember about the election of 1864: The “wrinkled and sagging” visage of 55-year-old Abraham Lincoln versus the smooth complexion of 38-year-old Army Gen. George B. McClellan. Lincoln won and then we invented botox and here we are.
Dems Snag Santos Seat
Democrat Tom Suozzi won back the House seat on Long Island held by the fabulist George Santos until his ignominious exit from Congress. In a closely watched race that ended up being not particularly close, Suozzi is leading Mazi Melesa Pilip 54%-46% with 93% of the vote counted.
The biggest immediate impact of the Democratic win is to further tighten the GOP’s-already extremely narrow majority in the House.
‘This Very Foolish Woman’
Former President Donald Trump reacted to the GOP loss in the NY-03 by demeaning Republican nominee Mazi Melesa Pilip as “this very foolish woman.”
2024 Ephemera
- Pennsylvania Democrats held onto their slim majority in the state House by winning a special election in Bucks County.
- Liberal group Our Revolution is backing the movement to cast a vote against Biden in the Michigan Democratic primary as a protest against his Gaza policies.
- I love the smell of nepotism in the morning:
The Next Installment In TPM’s Chesebro Series
The Ideas Man: How Chesebro’s Most Radical Theories Entered Trump Campaign Planning for Pence and Jan. 6
Trump Prosecution Watch
- The Supreme Court gave Special Counsel Jack Smith until 4 p.m. ET on Feb. 20 to respond to Trump’s application to stay the proceedings in the immunity case.
- NYT: Why the Case Against Fani Willis Feels Familiar to Black Women
Threats Against Federal Judges Double Since 2021
Reuters: “Serious threats to U.S. federal judges have more than doubled over the past three years, part of a growing wave of politically driven violence, according to U.S. Marshals Service data reviewed by Reuters.”
This Is Not A Drill
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One Thought
One thought on how this race turned out. As far as I know, not a single poll showed Pilip ahead. There were a few at the end that showed it close. But this was yet another race with a lot of junk or what we might call plain wrap polls. There were a couple polls I saw recently that had a modest single-point lead for Suozzi. But at least one of these and I think two also added a tighter screen of voters who were sure they were going to vote — slightly different from a standard “likely voter” screen. Those showed Suozzi moving into double digits. That made me pretty confident Suozzi was going to take this, for obvious reasons. The vibes world picked up a big Pilip surge in the final days. But that didn’t pan out.
That’s a Wrap
Okay, we finally got a first real batch of votes out of Nassau County. They confirm the story out of Queens. See the 9:40 p.m. update below. And now the AP has called it. Not sure where the final numbers will be. Nassau County takes a long time to report. But Suozzi wins this and it looks like it will be by a comfortable and perhaps even big margin.