Joan McCarter

Here’s a job for the national political press corps, if they can take time out from declaring doom for the Democrats in the midterms: Put elected Republicans and every GOP candidate on the ballot everywhere on the record about how their vilification of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi resulted in an assassination attempt against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and landed her husband in the hospital with serious injuries.

The House Republicans’ threat to hold the debt limit hostage in return for drastic spending cuts if they gain the majority in next month’s midterm election is already creating angst for economists and analysts, even though the fight could be as much as a year away.

“If we go into recession, the response normally is stimulative fiscal policy, but it seems like the appetite for that may be waning.

Here’s a job for the national political press corps, if they can take time out from declaring doom for the Democrats in the midterms: Put elected Republicans and every GOP candidate on the ballot everywhere on the record about how their vilification of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi resulted in an assassination attempt against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and landed her husband in the hospital with serious injuries.

UPDATE: Friday, Oct 21, 2022 · 9:09:19 PM +00:00

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Joan McCarter

As predicted, Graham has asked the Supreme Court to block the subpoena.

Another court has ruled that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) will have to appear before a Georgia grand jury to testify about his involvement in Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election in that state. A three-judge panel at the U.S.

If the GOP regains the House, four of the leading Republicans contenders for the House Budget Committee chair have all vowed to demand cuts to Social Security and Medicare in return for their cooperation in raising the debt ceiling next year. To be clear, that’s Republicans saying they will crash the U.S. economy to force President Joe Biden to give into their demands.

Last week we discovered, thanks to a niche media outlet, that Republicans are right now plotting about how they’ll destroy the economy as well as Social Security and Medicare if they take Congress.

Seventy million Americans are getting a healthy raise in January, and it’s coming not a moment too soon. The Social Security cost of living adjustment for 2023 is 8.7%, the biggest increase in four decades. Unfortunately, it comes with persistent inflation and big increase in the consumer price index—8.5%.

Kevin McCarthy, would-be House speaker, lied to two of the police officers who helped save his skin on Jan. 6. He lied to the mother of an officer who died after the attack, telling them last year that the person who commanded Trump’s violent followers to march to the U.S. Capitol had no idea at all what they were doing. He also took credit for Trump’s eventual public statement asking rioters to “go home.” One of the attendees, then-D.C.

House Republican candidates are ostensibly running on issues this fall. Odious chair of the House Republican Conference and Rep. Elise Stefanik insisted as much in a Fox interview this weekend. “Republicans are going to fight on behalf of the American people to help save America, to focus on economic issues, to rein in the spending that’s driving our inflation, to unleash American energy independence to lower the price of gas, energy, home heating bills.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has somehow managed to remain in his job, one of the last high-profile Trump holdovers, even though he has been under an ethical and legal cloud for the entirety of his tenure. We heard from one of those clouds Thursday, when a federal judge ruled that DeJoy’s changes to the U.S. Postal Service prior to the 2020 election harmed the service, but didn’t break election laws. Nonetheless, the judge blocked DeJoy from doing it again.

This is a big fucking deal, folks. President Joe Biden is making critical moves to decriminalize cannabis, most significantly erasing federal prosecutions for simple possession.

As I’ve said before, no one should be in jail just for using or possessing marijuana. Today, I’m taking steps to end our failed approach. Allow me to lay them out.

More than a decade ago, Ginni Thomas’s political activities drew scrutiny to her more public husband. More to the point, the failure of that husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, to declare decades of his wife’s income from that political activity drew attention, resulting in him revising 20 years’ worth of financial disclosure forms.

Joe Manchin is doing what Joe Manchin does best: Provide an obstacle. This time it’s the stopgap funding bill that needs to pass by midnight Friday or the government shuts down versus his push to get Congress to intervene in a private sector project and make it happen. That’s the main part of the energy project permitting bill he’s trying to shove through.

When you’re the Republicans and are trying to really hard to convince America to give you another shot at being in power, it would be a very good idea to stay far away from anything Russia. Particularly right now.

Oops.

When you’re the Republicans and are trying to really hard to convince America to give you another shot at being in power, it would be a very good idea to stay far away from anything Russia. Particularly right now.

Oops.

When you’re the Republicans and are trying to really hard to convince America to give you another shot at being in power, it would be a very good idea to stay far away from anything Russia. Particularly right now.

Oops.

The House passed the Presidential Election Reform Act Thursday, in a 229-203 vote. Nine Republicans voted with Democrats on a bill that would ensure the loopholes Donald Trump attempted to exploit in the 1887 Electoral Count Act are closed.

Those nine—Reps.

What’s a lot more popular with voters than the Supreme Court? The right to have an abortion. That’s the finding of two national surveys from the Marquette University Law School Poll released Wednesday and Thursday.

Marquette finds that the Supreme Court’s approval has plummeted in the past two years from 66% approval in September 2020 to 40% this month. That means just 40% of adults approve of the job the U.S. Supreme Court is doing.

New York Attorney General Letitia James has filed a $250 million civil lawsuit against Donald J. Trump, Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump, and Donald Trump Jr., as well as two Trump executives, Allan Weisselberg and Jeff McConney, for “numerous acts of fraud and misrepresentations,” and seeks to bar any of the Trumps from operating a company in the state of New York ever, or from engaging in any commercial real estate transactions in the state for five years.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ inhumane and depraved stunt keeps getting worse as more facts emerge. On Wednesday, DeSantis loaded 48 migrants—who are asylum-seekers mostly from Venezuela—onto planes in in San Antonio, Texas. They then flew them to Florida, then eventually on to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, where there are no refugee services.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ inhumane and depraved stunt keeps getting worse as more facts emerge. On Wednesday, DeSantis loaded 48 migrants—who are asylum-seekers mostly from Venezuela—onto planes in in San Antonio, Texas. They then flew them to Florida, then eventually on to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, where there are no refugee services.

What’s the first thing any self-respecting, savvy Democrat should do when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is having a bad week?

Make. It. Worse.

McConnell has lost control of his conference. South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham threw the Republican Senate into disarray with his national abortion ban. Meanwhile, Sen.

Republicans who have spent the past few weeks desperately trying to erase their abortion stances from their campaign websites had all that hard work go up in smoke Tuesday, when a freelancing Lindsey Graham decided to force the issue on them.

Some of them seemed to welcome it, though. Like Arizona’s Blake Masters, who’s running for the U.S. Senate. He was one of the first to start backpedaling from his extreme abortion stance.

Texas’s ban on abortions after six weeks has been in effect for about a year now, since the U.S. Supreme Court decided, from the shadow docket, to let it happen. Since then, the Court has overturned federal abortion protections, and Texas’s near-total ban has been enacted. Now it appears that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s administration is actively covering up any deaths that have occurred because of the forced birth laws.

Now would be a very good time for Senate Democrats to go for the jugular and make Senate Republicans show what they really would do if they gained the majority. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina just gave them that opportunity.

If Republicans win Congress, he said in announcing his new federal abortion ban legislation, “I assure you” there will be a vote to ban abortion.

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan gave a veiled, but sharp, rebuke to Chief Justice John Roberts, seemingly answering Roberts’ assertion that the Supreme Court is perfectly legitimate and the problem is all the people who disagree with their decisions because of politics.

The feud in the Senate Republican conference gets juicier by the day, with more and more senators feeling the need—when pressed by reporters—to take sides. The tension between Sen.

The day after President Joe Biden’s masterful condemnation of the fascist threat posed to the nation by MAGA Republicans’ mindless embrace of would-be tyrant Donald Trump, those Republicans are … doubling down on their support for Donald Trump.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to end federal abortion protections secured half a century ago under Roe v. Wade continues to flummox Republicans who finally got what they wished for. After decades of running for elections promising precisely this—an end to legal abortion—Republicans are desperately trying to rewrite that history, pretend like the Supreme Court didn’t do what it just did, or simply change the subject. It’s not working.

In a disturbing echo of his infamous exhortation to his Proud Boy supporters before the 2020 election to “stand back and stand by,” Donald Trump told Fox News Digital on Monday that he “will do whatever” he can “to help the country” following last week’s seizure of stolen documents from his Florida home. Trump said that the “temperature has to be brought down,” but stressed his conditions.