The Michigan Court of Claims on Tuesday granted a temporary injunction blocking enforcement of a 1931 law that would ban nearly all abortions in the state.
Continue reading “Court Temporarily Blocks Michigan’s 1931 Abortion Ban, Finding That It Likely Violates State Constitution”Some of November Will Come Into Focus Tonight
For Democrats to survive the 2022 midterm with their majorities intact they must walk a very, very narrow tightrope. They also need a number of things that are mostly out of their control to fall into place. One of those things is the hope that you will see some replay of what happened in 2010 and 2012. The first was an extremely good year for Republicans. The second was just so-so — Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama after all. But it should have been a decent year for Senate Republicans since Democrats were defending their class of 2006, when they’d won Senate seats basically everywhere. In both years Republicans failed to win the Senate even though by rights they really should have. They just kept nominating crankish and extreme candidates in races that should have been winnable. That’s why there’s a Senator Chris Coons (“I’m not a witch”). That’s why Claire McCaskill (“Legitimate rape”) had one more term in the Senate. There are a bunch of other examples.
Continue reading “Some of November Will Come Into Focus Tonight”Wisconsin Dem Electors Sue Fake Trump Electors To Warn Against Future Steal Schemes
Two Wisconsin Democratic presidential electors are suing 10 Republicans who acted as fake electors for then-President Trump following the 2020 election.
Continue reading “Wisconsin Dem Electors Sue Fake Trump Electors To Warn Against Future Steal Schemes”FEC v. Ted Cruz For Senate Is Just The Latest In A Wretched Line Of Cases
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
On Monday, thanks to a case brought by Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), the Supreme Court struck down another aspect of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA). At issue in this case was a limit on how much a candidate could loan themselves and have donors repay them after an election. The limit had been a generous $250,000. Following yesterday’s ruling, even that fig leaf is gone, leaving elected officials free to ask donors for money that will go right into their own pockets.
The case is FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate. Senator Ted Cruz loaned $260,000 to his campaign committee and then sought reimbursement from political donors to make himself whole. This was $10,000 over the then-legal limit, suggesting the violation was ginned up as a test case to challenge another aspect of BCRA. (It also undermines any everyman image Cruz might be trying to portray — how many of us could loan anyone, including a political campaign, over $250k?)
The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) was the brain child of Republican Senator John McCain (AZ) and Democratic Senator Russ Feingold (WI), and it was passed in part as reaction to the implosion of Enron. The Rehnquist Court in 2003 upheld nearly every aspect of the BCRA as constitutional against a facial challenge in McConnell v. FEC.
The Act is now only 20 years old, but it has had a hell of a time before the Roberts Supreme Court. As I wrote about here, the Roberts Supreme Court has been deregulating corruption since its very first term by kicking big holes in campaign finance laws and by making white collar crime harder to prosecute as it lets shady politicians — from Bob McDonnell to Bridget Anne Kelly — off the hook for corrupt acts.
The Roberts Supreme Court took its first chunk out of BCRA in Davis v. FEC — striking down a law called the millionaire’s amendment which had allowed candidates running against super rich self-financed candidates to raise more money. The Court, in Davis, came perilously close to ruling that it was unconstitutional to discriminate against the rich. As Justice Alito wrote in his majority opinion:
“Different candidates have different strengths. Some are wealthy; others have wealthy supporters who are willing to make large contributions. … Leveling electoral opportunities means making and implementing judgments about which strengths should be permitted to contribute to the outcome of an election. …it is a dangerous business for Congress to use the election laws to influence the voters’ choices.”
Later, in 2007’s FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life, the Roberts Court limited what ads could be regulated under BCRA.
Then, in 2010’s Citizens United v. FEC, the Roberts Court really took a hatchet to BCRA, finding that the law’s ban on corporate-funded political ads was unconstitutional. This opinion caught the attention of lots of Americans, from the President to average citizens who decried this turn of events as worthy of amending the Constitution. President Obama called out the Supreme Court in his first State of the Union declaring, “[w]ith all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections.” In the audience, Justice Alito (now famous for his leaked opinion overturning Roe v. Wade) shook his head and mouthed the words “not true.” History has shown Obama was right as “corporations gave $301 million to super PACs and hybrid PACs from the 2012 to 2018 cycles, 87 percent of which went to conservative groups” and there was an additional $100 million in corporate spending in the 2020 election.
In the new case authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, there is enormous sympathy shown for Senator Cruz in passages like “Cruz, of course, suffers a $10,000 pocketbook harm.” Roberts also continues his longstanding hostility to campaign finance reform stating “we have denied attempts to reduce the amount of money in politics, to level electoral opportunities by equalizing candidate resources, and to limit the general influence a contributor may have over an elected official.” In the end Roberts concludes: “the Government has not shown that Section 304 [of BCRA] furthers a permissible anticorruption goal, rather than the impermissible objective of simply limiting the amount of money in politics… We also conclude that this provision burdens core political speech without proper justification.”
In her dissent in Cruz, Justice Elena Kagan had several choice words for the majority including in the opening paragraph, where she described an elected politician getting made whole after a huge loan to his campaign is repaid by political donors: “The politician is happy; the donors are happy. The only loser is the public. It inevitably suffers from government corruption.”
So now the Cruz case — decided 6 to 3 — sticks another dagger in the law that hoped to protect federal elections from the corrupting influence of money in politics. This is deeply unfortunate. Perhaps those seeking a Constitutional Amendment to permit reasonable campaign finance reform have a point.
Ciara Torres-Spelliscy is a Visiting Professor at American University Washington College of Law and the author of the book Political Brands.
Fund More Treatments
At some point around the new year I switched from obsessively checking my curated COVID experts Twitter list to obsessively checking my two newly curated Ukraine crisis Twitter lists (Ukraine Crisis and Ukraine military experts). Such is life.
This morning I was browsing through the COVID list and I found my way to this post by Eric Topol. Topol is a physician generalist who heads up a biomedical institute at the Scripps Research Center in California. He’s not an epidemiologist or virologist. But COVID has been his focus since the beginning of the pandemic. The post is entitled The Covid Capitulation. And it is part of that genre of COVID writing in which a COVID expert bemoans the fact that the whole country has decided the epidemic is over when in fact it’s clearly not.
Continue reading “Fund More Treatments”Fox Guest Claims Biracial Son Got Critical Race Theory’d Into Not Doing His Chores
It turns out that the horrors of critical race theory manifest themselves in every corner of life, like when a kid doesn’t want to clean his room. Just ask Melissa Riley, a white single mother in Virginia who’s suing her biracial son’s school district over its anti-racism policy.
Continue reading “Fox Guest Claims Biracial Son Got Critical Race Theory’d Into Not Doing His Chores”The Franchise: DeSantis Undermines Black Congressional Districts
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Tucker Carlson Doesn’t Know What Buffalo Shooter’s Talking About With All This Crazy ‘Great Replacement’ Stuff
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Who, Me???
Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Monday night tried to put up a wall between himself and a gunman’s alleged motive for opening fire in a Black neighborhood’s grocery store in Buffalo.
After peddling the Great Replacement Theory on the regular on his program, Carlson found himself shocked! at the backlash against him.
- The Fox host insisted on Monday that the suspected shooter’s manifesto was, in fact, “not really political at all” and nothing more than “a rambling pastiche of slogans and Internet memes.”
- Also, Carlson wants his viewers to know that they’re the real victims here. The Fox host accused his critics of using the shooting as a “pretext” to stifle free speech.
- Carlson didn’t directly address the replacement conspiracy theory during his monologue. Again, it’s a conspiracy theory he’s advanced over and over on his show.
Arizona Senate To Investigate Wendy Rogers For Claiming Buffalo Shooting Was False Flag
The GOP-controlled Arizona Senate voted on Monday to launch an ethics investigation into state Sen. Wendy Rogers (R) after she baselessly suggested that the deadly Buffalo shooting, which was allegedly inspired by the racist “great replacement” theory, was a false flag operation by the government (there’s no evidence for that whatsoever).
- “Fed boy summer has started in Buffalo,” Rogers wrote in a Telegram post on Saturday after the attack.
- The vote to approve the investigation came after Arizona Democrats’ motion to full-on expel Rogers failed. The Senate would need to reach a supermajority of two-thirds in order to kick her out.
Moment Of Truth For Some Of MAGA’s Worst
We’ve got some pretty major primaries today in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Idaho, where we’ll see how some of these Trump ghouls will fare ahead of the November midterms:
- North Carolina: Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC)
- Pennsylvania: State Sen. Doug Mastriano (R) for governor and conservative commentator Kathy Barnette for U.S. Senate
- Idaho: Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin (R) for governor
Pennsylvania Senate Hopeful Marched With Proud Boys On Jan. 6
Newly surfaced photos show far-right Pennsylvania Senate candidate Kathy Barnette marching to the Capitol with the far-right Proud Boys on Jan. 6:
- Barnett’s campaign claimed that the candidate had “no connection whatsoever” to the Proud Boys, and that she didn’t participate in the violent attack on the Capitol that day.
- Barnett also declared a day before the insurrection that she was bringing buses full of “pissed off patriots” to D.C. for the Jan. 6 rally as part of “our 1776 moment,” per CNN.
Trump Throws Cawthorn A Lifeline
The former president threw his support behind the besieged Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) on the eve of North Carolina’s primaries, writing on TRUTH Social, his Twitter knockoff, that the lawmaker only “made some foolish mistakes, which I don’t believe he’ll make again.”
- So apparently Trump’s gotten over the video of Cawthorn messing around with a guy and apparently humping his face, which at one point prompted the ex-president to ask if Cawthorn was “fucking his cousin,” according to Rolling Stone.
- While Cawthorn has said that the video included his cousin, the actual allegation as far as ethics violations go is that he improperly gave his cousin more than $141,000 in taxpayer and campaign funds.
Must Read
“1 in 6 Americans live in areas with significant wildfire risk” – The Washington Post
Georgia Voters Press On With MTG Disqualification Bid
The Georgia voters who are trying to get Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) kicked off the ballot filed an appeal on Monday to fight Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s (R) decision to reject their challenge.
GOP Senator Booed For Dragging Transgender Grievance Nonsense Into Commencement Speech
Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) apologized for claiming that “the existence of two sexes, male and female” was a “fundamental scientific truth” during her commencement speech at the University of Wyoming on Sunday. Students booed the senator as she pasted this awkward-ass smile on her face:
- Lummis put out a statement after the speech apologizing to anyone who felt “un-welcomed or disrespected” by her comment, which was “intended to highlight the times in which we find ourselves, times in which the metric of biological sex is under debate.” K.
Sentencing Delayed For Gaetz Wingman Cooperating With Feds
Sentencing for ex-Florida tax official and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) buddy Joel Greenberg has been delayed again as he continues to cooperate with the Justice Department’s sex trafficking investigation into Gaetz.
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Where Things Stand: Most Americans Don’t Want SCOTUS To Do What SCOTUS Is About To Do
New polling conducted by NBC News has found that American opposition to overturning Roe v. Wade is at a record high. The poll was conducted after the draft Supreme Court majority opinion overturning Roe was leaked earlier this month.
Continue reading “Where Things Stand: Most Americans Don’t Want SCOTUS To Do What SCOTUS Is About To Do”Save Us, Obi-Wan Rand Paul
Here’s a fascinating and humorous (for reasons I’ll explain presently) quick segment from Russian TV. One of the panelists is a Russian military affairs commentator who goes completely rogue and starts setting forth the dire strategic picture Russia faces — poor morale, an almost unlimited supply of soldiers in Ukraine, arms pouring in from Europe and the United States, geopolitical isolation.
The other panelists take potshots at his reasoning but to little real effect.
But the best part is about halfway through he says, no, not even Rand Paul can save us. Really! He doesn’t refer to Paul by name but he notes that the Lend-Lease type program is finally getting underway, marrying unlimited troops with unlimited weaponry “and even the resistance of a single senator will be overcome quickly.” That single senator is Rand Paul, who he is so far blocking passage of the bill.
Video after the jump …
Continue reading “Save Us, Obi-Wan Rand Paul”