The Georgia Supreme Court, unanimously and without commentary, shot down Republicans’ attempt to bar a day of early voting in the Senate runoff between Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) and Herschel Walker.
Continue reading “Georgia Supreme Court Unanimously Blocks GOP Attempt To Nix Day Of Early Runoff Voting”Arizona AG Candidate Denies 2022 Election Results With Trumped-Up Lawsuit
Yet another Republican candidate for office in Arizona is refusing to accept his loss—or, in this case, a recount.
Republican attorney general candidate Abe Hamadeh filed a lawsuit—with backing from the Republican National Committee—on Tuesday contesting the results of his race against Democratic opponent Kris Mayes, who’s currently leading in the final tally by 510 votes.
Mayes’ lead was slim enough to trigger an automatic recount in the state, but that wasn’t enough for Hamadeh: The former prosecutor is asking the State Superior Court in Maricopa County to overturn the results (which he believes to be fraudulent because of … printer issues) and name him the winner.
Continue reading “Arizona AG Candidate Denies 2022 Election Results With Trumped-Up Lawsuit”Dispatch #2: Collision
Coming out of the 2022 midterms, conventional wisdom pointed to one lesson for the GOP: Voters didn’t like Big Lie MAGA Republicans. The Big Lie and MAGA have become all but indistinguishable. But to the extent they are distinguishable, if you came to the game on the back of a Trump endorsement, you probably didn’t fare well in 2022. The best example are all those Big Lie secretary of state candidates in swing states. Every last one of them lost. That and related defeats are what has given rivals in the GOP at least an opening to challenge Trump for leadership of the party. After years when he could make or break anyone in the GOP, in 2022 Trump looked like an electoral loser. Conventional wisdom is usually most noteworthy for what it misses. But the signal here was so strong as to be undeniable: Trump had a stranglehold on the GOP. But in a general election his embrace was toxic, except in solidly red states.
Continue reading “Dispatch #2: Collision”McCarthy Is Still Hemorrhaging Speaker Votes Even As He Bends Over Backwards For MAGA
Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) announced he would not vote for House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) for speaker next year, joining the small but mighty chorus of MAGA-aligned detractors in his caucus who are refusing to bend the knee – at least not before throwing a minor fit.
Continue reading “McCarthy Is Still Hemorrhaging Speaker Votes Even As He Bends Over Backwards For MAGA”The Donald’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Is It Finally Happening?
I would love to style this as the legal vise is finally closing on Donald Trump. Or the wheel of justice grinds slow but fine. Or that the courts have finally had enough of Trump’s inane legal arguments.
Maybe we’ll look back in a few months and conclude those would have been accurate ways to frame yesterday’s events. But given how many times we’ve reached back to kick that football right out of Lucy’s hands only to swing at air, it’d be a little credulous and overdetermined to proclaim that accountability is finally at hand.
But … maybe it is?
Over the course of a single hour yesterday afternoon, things went very badly for Donald Trump.
- Trump’s legal arguments in the Mar-a-Lago documents case were absolutely pulverized by a federal appeals court.
- After years of litigation, the Supreme Court declined to weigh in on whether Trump’s tax returns must be turned over to the House Ways & Means Committee, ending his path to legal recourse to block the move.
Both legal setbacks for Trump came against a backdrop of other looming risks for him: Jean Carroll is poised to tack on new, more serious charges to her claims that Trump raped and defamed her; the trial of the Trump Org for tax fraud continues in New York City; and the trial of Oath Keepers for seditious conspiracy for the Jan. 6 attack continues in Washington, D.C.
Let’s focus on Mar-a-Lago for the moment.
How Bad Was It For Trump?
Sample headlines from the Mar-a-Lago oral arguments:
NYT: Court Appears Ready to End Special Master Review in Trump Files Inquiry
WaPo: Appeals panel grills Trump lawyer over FBI search of Mar-a-Lago
CNN: Appeals court is dubious of Trump’s arguments for special master review of Mar-a-Lago search
Bloomberg: Trump Faces Skeptical Appeals Court in Mar-a-Lago Document Fight With DOJ
No, But How Bad Was It Really?
Former U.S. Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal: “My god, in the Trump Special Master appeal, I don’t think I’ve ever heard an oral argument go worse for a litigant. … They are demolishing Trump’s lawyer. It’s not close.”
Former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman: “Trumps lawyer got beaten up pretty badly. He lurched at the end for a whole new argument about a general warrant, and the court called him out on it.”
Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Alene: “A hot bench & not a very receptive one for Trump in Atlanta just now. In 40 minutes of argument, all 3 judges seemed inclined to rule against him.”
Law professor Orin Kerr: “From what I can tell, the idea of creating special rules for former Presidents to help them think of new arguments they can make to challenge the government when they are under criminal investigation does not seem to have a lot of legs in the 11th Circuit today.”
What The Judges Said
It’s almost always a mistake to take what judges say in oral arguments literally, but in this case the thrust of the judges’ questions was unmistakeable:
- “I don’t think it’s necessarily the fault of the government if someone has intermingled classified documents and all kinds of other personal property.”
- “Do you think that ‘raid’ is the right term for execution of a warrant?”
- “Do you think it’s rare that the target of a warrant thinks the government is overreaching?”
- “Other than the fact that this involves a former president, everything else about this is indistinguishable from any pre-indictment search warrant.”
- “If you can’t establish that it was unlawful, then what are we doing here?”
Finally, The Tax Returns
I doubt the public is going to see Trump’s tax returns any time soon, and there’s very little time left in the current Congress for the House Ways & Means Committee to make robust use of them. So in that sense, I suppose, Trump’s delays worked and he “won.” But his exhaustion of the legal paths to fight the committee, and especially the Supreme Court’s refusal to weigh in, does amount to a vindication of the rule of law, albeit a modest one.
What Did Lindsey Say?
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) finally testified Tuesday before the Georgia grand jury investigating Trump’s 2020 election meddling. It doesn’t appear that Graham invoked the 5th Amendment or declined to answer questions on Speech and Debate Clause grounds. In contrast to Graham’s vigorous legal fight to avoid testifying, his office released a mild statement that he answered all the questions asked of him.
No word yet on whether Mike Flynn testified to the grand jury yesterday as scheduled.
Business As Usual
Republicans are fighting like hell to prevent Saturday voting in the Georgia runoff for U.S. Senate.
Keep An Eye On Arizona
The election-denying GOP nominee for attorney general has filed suit over the election results, ahead of what is expected to be an automatic recount in his race.
Overnight Shooting At Virginia Walmart
A gunman opened fire at a Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia, late Tuesday night killing at least six people. The shooter was reportedly found dead inside the store, but it was unclear how he died.
Picking Through The Pieces Of The Last Mass Shooting
The 22-year-old Colorado Springs gunman legally changed his name as a teenager after being the victim of a brutal episode of online bullying, the Washington Post reports. The newspaper also confirmed that the shooter is the grandson of California state Rep. Randy Voepel.
AP Reporter Fired
The AP has terminated James LaPorta, a 35-year-old national security reporter involved in the erroneous report that an errant missile strike in Poland was fired by Russia.
The situation is, to put it mildly, complicated, but the internal Slack messages leading up to the faulty AP alert bathe no one in glory:
All By Myself
TPM’s Kate Riga wrote a brilliant account of the oral arguments that is centered on Trump’s weird fixation with a Celine Dion photograph the FBI seized at Mar-a-Lago.
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Is Long COVID Part Of The Historically Tight Labor Market? Signs Point to Yes.
Amanda Finley got interested in archeology when her third grade teacher spent the school year on it. “I just loved it,” she said. Finley decided then that she wanted to become an archeologist, and she did.
Continue reading “Is Long COVID Part Of The Historically Tight Labor Market? Signs Point to Yes.”Where Things Stand: A Fight From Another Era
The Supreme Court today rejected Donald Trump’s last-ditch request that the High Court block House Democrats from viewing his tax returns, meaning House Democrats can attempt to finally get the records from the Treasury Department before Republicans take back the House in January.
The order was brief, unsigned and noted no dissents.
Continue reading “Where Things Stand: A Fight From Another Era”Your Day in MAGA Domestic Terrorists
Today we have a criminal complaint filed in the Eastern District of Michigan against Neil Matthew Walter who the United States government charges with making threats against the lives of Congressman John Garamendi (D-CA) and FBI Director Christopher Wray. On checking Walter’s Facebook page investigators found “numerous comments stating beliefs that half the Senators, the FBI, CIA, police, Tom Cruise, and Elon Musk are involved in a child slave rape ring, listing various locations where these rings are located, one of which identified the United States Capitol Building.”
In other words, yet another QAnon/MAGA domestic terrorist riled up by the endless parade of incitement usually centering on Democrats running pedophilia rings. Another player in the same bucket as the man who bashed in the head of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband days before the midterm election.
Walter’s interest in Cruise and Musk just adds a bit of variety to the mix.
Continue reading “Your Day in MAGA Domestic Terrorists”Second Woman To Allege Walker Paid For Her Abortion Dares Him To Face Her Before Runoff
Jane Doe — the unnamed woman who came forward in late October alleging that in 1993 Senate candidate Herschel Walker (R) pressured her to get an abortion — is challenging Walker to meet her in person before Georgia’s runoff election, which is scheduled for Dec. 6.
Continue reading “Second Woman To Allege Walker Paid For Her Abortion Dares Him To Face Her Before Runoff”Appellate Court Sharply Critical Of Trump Position In Mar-a-Lago Documents Case
Former President Donald Trump’s lawyer presented his stew of rapidly changing, sometimes conflicting, always ephemeral legal arguments in the case stemming from the August raid of Mar-a-Lago to a panel of appellate judges on Tuesday — who often reacted with incredulity.
Continue reading “Appellate Court Sharply Critical Of Trump Position In Mar-a-Lago Documents Case”