‘Laying the Breadcrumbs’
Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) sent a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and to Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Tuesday, asking both Defense Department officials to confirm that the Pentagon will not send troops to polling places during the upcoming midterms.
“I’d ask you to confirm a simple statement: the Department of Defense will not send Federal troops to the polls or to seize election materials of any kind,” Slotkin wrote to both officials in a letter she exclusively shared with the Associated Press.
Slotkin has been vocal on this issue for months now. Back in February, she was one of the only Democrats on the Senate Homeland Security Committee who pressed then-acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Todd Lyons about how he would respond to orders to deploy his agents to the polls this fall. At the time, Trump had just started publicly musing about whether he should try to “nationalize” voting and Steve Bannon was talking on a his podcast about how President Trump should send ICE agents to the polls to make sure noncitizens don’t vote. Questions about ICE at the polls also birthed out of staunch public opposition to Trump’s demands for the National Guard to be deployed to blue cities under the guise of some sort of crackdown on crime.
Slotkin told the AP that she decided to contact Hegseth — who has played an active role in trying to help carry out one of Trump’s retribution schemes against her and her colleagues for a video they posted on social media reminding troops that they can refuse to carry out illegal orders — because Trump has been setting himself up to claim the midterms were fraudulent. She also cited Trump’s interest, in 2020, in sending in the military to seize voting machines in the wake of his claims that the election was stolen.
“He’s very clearly laying the breadcrumbs to be able to say the day after the election that he didn’t really lose the House or he didn’t really lose the Senate,” Slotkin told the AP.
Federal law, of course, bars the deployment of armed federal troops to election polling places unless it is deemed “necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.”
When Slotkin tried to asked Hegseth back in April about whether it’s an action the Trump administration is weighing, Hegseth dodged, saying, “I’ve never been ordered to do anything illegal, and I won’t.”
John Cornyn Defends Staffer Who Went to Work for Talarico
A former longtime staffer for Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) has gone to work for James Talarico, the Democratic Senate candidate’s campaign announced on Tuesday. NOTUS was first to report the news Tuesday that Jacob Smith, deputy legislative director for Cornyn, will now work as deputy policy director for Talarico. Smith told The Hill in a statement Tuesday that the decision was motivated, in part, by his staunch opposition to Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general and Republican Senate nominee who beat Cornyn in the primaries after Trump endorsed his bid, effectively ending Cornyn’s career in the Senate.
“I’ve worked for Republicans like Senator Cornyn my entire career, but this year I’m proud to be joining James Talarico’s campaign. Instead of playing partisan politics, Talarico speaks to the needs of everyday people who day in and day out work too hard for too little,” Smith told The Hill. “I’m encouraging all my fellow Republicans who know Ken Paxton is unfit to serve in the Senate to finally hold him accountable at the ballot box.”
Cornyn defended his longtime staffer in a post on Twitter Tuesday morning, saying, “only in authoritarian countries does someone else get to decide where you work. Not in Texas.”
ABC Sues FCC as Carr Carries Out Retribution Campaign
ABC and its corporate parent, the Walt Disney Co., sued the Federal Communications Commission in federal court Tuesday over the agency’s recent investigations into the network and challenges to its broadcast license renewals. FCC Chair Brendan Carr has made it almost explicit that these actions against ABC are part of a Trumpian retribution scheme in retaliation for jokes made on its late-night shows and for unfavorable coverage of Trump’s war with Iran. ABC argues in the lawsuit that the Trump administration has violated its free speech rights.
“Government censorship is deeply un-American,” the lawsuit says.
“The Administration has waged a retaliatory campaign against ABC for a single reason: it disapproves of what ABC broadcasts,” it continues.
This is the latest development in an ongoing saga that involves Carr using his position as head of FCC to punish those in the media who criticize Trump, which TPM has covered extensively. This piece will catch you up to speed.
Read This From TPM Today
“… Not only is the Trump DOJ engaged in squirrelly workarounds to install loyalists in blue states and bypass the Senate, but it’s risking having legitimate criminal prosecutions thrown out in order to do so,” David Kurtz writes in today’s edition of Morning Memo: Appeals Court Blocks Trump’s Scheme on US Attorneys
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James Fishback Is Probably About to Lose. His Politics Might Be Winning.
Pump and dump.
One can only admire Elissa Slotkin. She does not suffer fools.
Make sure they’re armed to the teeth. Along with, of course, carrying all the latest citizenship data on their cellphones, so they can call up the citizenship papers and judicial statuses of every individual who touches a ballot.
Do Republicans realize they’re hosting a gestapo government, revolting to almost every single human being living on this planet?
Their party stains them all.
Translation, I have a new house in Virginia and I don’t want to take my kids out of school.
I think Brendo Carr is going to learn that you don’t mess with the Mouse. To paraphrase a line from the Princess Bride: Brendon Carr fell victim to one of the classic blunders - The most famous of which is ‘never get involved in a land war in Asia’ - but only slightly less well-known is this: ‘Never go in against the Mouse when the First Amendment is on the line!’" [1, 2, 3, 4]