A record-breaking 6 Native candidates were elected to Congress on Tuesday

CBS News

A record-breaking 6 Native candidates were elected to Congress on Tuesday

Six Native American and Native Hawaiian were elected to the House of Representatives on Tuesday — a record-breaking number.

Democratic Representative Sharice Davids won reelection in Kansas, CBS News projects. She defeated Amanda Adkins, becoming the only Democrat representing Kansas in the House.

In Hawaii, Democratic candidate Kaiali’i Kahele defeated his Republican challenger Joe Akana, CBS News projects. Kahele will be only the second Native Hawaiian to represent the state in Congress.

In Oklahoma, CBS News projects both Representative Tom Cole and Representative Markwayne Mullin, two Republicans, won reelection.

Democratic Congresswoman Debra Haaland of New Mexico also won reelection. Republican Yvette Herrell also won in New Mexico.

According to Indian Country Today, a total of 13 Native American candidates were competing for House seats this year. The six winners have set a record. The group is split evenly by party — three Democrats and three Republicans.

In 2019, Cole and Haaland became co-chairs of the bipartisan Congressional Native American Caucus, which “seeks to educate members of Congress and encourage an open dialogue about issues affecting Native Americans,” according to a press release from Cole’s office.

“As part of this mission, the caucus regularly convenes briefings, considers the impact of legislation on tribal nations and provides a forum for members of Congress to exchange information, ideas and research.” In 2016 only four member of Congress were Native American, according to the release.

Cole is a member of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma. Haaland is a member of the Pueblo of Laguna who also has Jemez Pueblo heritage.

Davids, who in 2018 became the first Native American congresswomen, is also one of the few openly gay women in Congress. She is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation.

Herrell is a member of the Cherokee Nation, according to the Albuquerque Journal. Representative Markwayne Mullin is a member of the Cherokee Nation as well.

Kahele, who served as a state senator in Hawaii, is of Native Hawaiian ancestry; his family comes from the small fishing village of Miloli’i in South Kona.

New Mexico makes history by becoming first state to elect all women of color to the House

CBS News

New Mexico makes history by becoming first state to elect all women of color to the House

New Mexico just became the first state to elect all women of color to its House Delegation. Three women announced they had won their districts early Wednesday morning, which were confirmed by the state.

Democratic incumbent Representative Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo Tribe, won reelection to her House seat against challenger Garcia Holmes. Haaland also mad history in 2018 as one of the first Native American women elected to Congress.

“Tonight the people of New Mexico have chosen hope over fear, love over hate, community over division, and I am so honored that New Mexicans have chosen me to serve in our nation’s 117th Congress,” Haaland tweeted Tuesday night.

Democrat Teresa Leger Fernandez beat out Republican Alexis Johnson for the state’s 3rd Congressional District. Fernandez will replace Democratic Representative Ben Ray Lujan, who won the state’s open Senate seat.

“The people of New Mexico have chosen to protect what we love — our democracy, our planet, our families and communities, our health care and our future,” Leger Fernandez tweeted following the win. “With this victory, I promise you I will take the courageous action that this historic moment demands. Muchísimas gracias!”

Republican Yvette Herrell, a member of the Cherokee nation, won her challenge against incumbent Democratic Representative Xochitl Torres Small in the state’s 2nd Congressional District. Herrell had the support of several big-name Republicans, including President Donald Trump.

“It’s the honor of my life to be elected to serve #NM02,” Herrell tweeted. “My commitment to each citizen of our district is that I will serve each of them with integrity as we work together to rebuild our economy and protect the values that make America great!”

“We knew that that was going to be an all-female delegation because there were six major party candidates who were all women running, so no matter how the race came out, you were going have an all-female delegation,” CBS News chief congressional correspondent Nancy Cordes said Wednesday morning.

New Mexico was just one of a number of states with historic firsts in Tuesday’s election.

In New York, Democrats Mondaire Jones and Ritchie Torres became the first two openly gay Black men elected to Congress. In Missouri, Black Lives Matter activist and nurse Cori Bush became the first Black woman elected to Congress in the state.

In North Carolina, Madison Cawthorn will soon be the youngest member of Congress at just 25 years old. He’ll take the record from Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who was 29 when she was first elected in 2018.

And in Delaware, Sarah McBride will be the first openly transgender state senator in U.S. history — also making her the country’s highest-ranking openly transgender official.

Trump has attacked democracy’s institutions, but never so blatantly as he did overnight

Washington Post – politics

Trump has attacked democracy’s institutions, but never so blatantly as he did overnight

By Dan Balz                         November 4, 2020

President Trump and first lady Melania Trump leave the East Room of the White House early Wednesday after the president declared himself the winner in the election.

 

For four years, President Trump has sought to undermine the institutions of a democratic society, but never so blatantly as in the early morning hours of Wednesday. His attempt to falsely claim victory and to subvert the election itself by calling for a halt to vote-counting represents the gravest of threats to the stability of the country.

Millions of votes remain to be counted, votes cast legally under the laws of the states. Until they are all counted, the outcome of the election remains in doubt. Either he or former vice president Joe Biden could win an electoral college majority, but neither has yet done so, no matter what he says. Those are the facts, for which the president shows no respect.

A president who respected the Constitution would let things play out. But Trump has shown once again he cares not about the Constitution or the stability and well-being of the country or anything like that. He cares only about himself and retaining the powers he now holds. And so he cries “fraud” when there is no evidence whatsoever of any such thing.

With millions of votes still to be counted, Trump falsely asserts fraud and makes a claim of victory

Notably, Vice President Pence would not fully embrace what the president said. Notably, Pence would not directly contradict or challenge the president. His loyalty will not allow him to do what he knows is right, which is to call out the wrong in the man he serves.

In the moment, a few Republicans did challenge the president. This is one more time when the elected leaders of the party will be called to account. Time and again they have failed to stand up to this president. Will this be any different? No one should have high expectations of a revolt, though the stakes are greater than ever.

Trump’s words seek to make a possible Biden victory illegitimate. Biden, in his brief statement, said he believed he would win but stopped short of claiming he had or making threats. Would that Trump had done something similar. Whatever happens in the vote count, whatever the courts do or don’t do, Trump has given his followers license to see anything other than a Trump victory as a stolen election

Biden confident he’s on track to win election
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden urged patience early on Nov. 4 at the Chase Center in Wilmington, Del., as votes continued to be counted. (Photo: Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)

What the president did — and did from inside the White House itself rather than from a neutral site — was not the act of a confident leader. Instead it was a sign of the desperation he must feel as he watches his presidency on the brink. In reality, he stands in a better position than many of the polls had suggested ahead of the election. There was talk of a Democratic blowout, a big Biden victory and a brand new electoral map.

So far, that hasn’t really materialized. Trump held states that were thought to be in play — Florida, Texas and Ohio the biggest and most important. He is leading in North Carolina and in Georgia, although in Georgia there appear to be many uncounted ballots that could narrow his margin. His party has maintained control of the Senate. The election has been far better for Republicans than many thought it might be.

But Trump is trailing in Arizona, and one network, Fox News, has already called it for Biden. Other networks have not. Republican Gov. Doug Ducey has called for all the votes there to be counted. The president pretends not to hear the logic of that argument. He has focused on the three states — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — that will determine who takes the oath on Jan. 20.

In each of those states, the president led overnight, but the mail ballots are believed to be the last to be counted and Biden presumably will win far more of them than Trump. Whether he can win enough to carry two or three of them, which he would need to do if he in fact loses Arizona, must await a legitimate count.

The president somehow fears this and so wants to call a halt. His likeliest target will be Pennsylvania, where he will probably challenge the decision to allow ballots that arrive over the next three days to be counted.

He claimed he would head straight to the Supreme Court for relief. In the days before the election, he was practically begging the high court, with its now 6-to-3 conservative majority thanks to the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, to become his backstop. There is no legal avenue for him to go directly to the court, so some of this is mere bluster. But he is already beginning to work the referees.

Were this happening in another country, American officials would decry it as an act of an authoritarian leader. Trump would not be among them, however, as he’s proved by his tepid reaction to what appears to be a stolen election in Belarus. “I like democracy” was about as strong as he could go when asked to comment. He may say he likes democracy, but not enough to let the democratic process of voting and counting continue normally.

The process of counting votes takes time, especially with mail ballots. There is no evidence of any widespread fraud in places that have used the system for years. More ballots were mailed this year because of fears about voting in person during the coronavirus pandemic, a pandemic that the president says, again falsely, is all but gone.

States sought to make accommodations to make voting by mail easier. Republicans have resisted and resisted those efforts. Now the president has taken a far more dangerous step, which is to attempt to intervene to shut down the process.

What comes next, if Biden wins? The president has repeatedly declined to pledge a peaceful transfer of power. He’s been asked several times and each time has demurred. Perhaps he will leave office if, ultimately, this effort to disrupt the count fails and Biden wins. But the damage he is doing cannot be understated.

Trump has weakened democratic institutions. He has warred with his own Justice Department. He has flagrantly refused to cooperate with Congress on any investigation. He has attacked the free press. Now he seems to undermine the very foundation of a democratic society — free elections. Where will it end?

The system of government established by the founders has proved to be resilient despite all that, even if the strains are showing. But in doing what he did early Wednesday morning, Trump has guaranteed that the divisions that have deepened during his time in office will grow even worse.

Trump and His GOP Enablers Are as Bad as Benedict Arnold

The Daily Beast

Trump and His GOP Enablers Are as Bad as Benedict Arnold

David Rothkop                                November 2, 2020
SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images
SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images

 

The president of the United States is a traitor.

He is a liar. He is a fraud. He is a racist. He is a misogynist. He is incompetent. He is corrupt. He is unfit in almost every respect for the high office he holds.

But what distinguishes him from every other bad leader the United States has had and, indeed, from every other senior official of the U.S. government in over twenty-four decades of history, is that he has repeatedly, indisputably, and egregiously betrayed his country.

How that is defined and litigated by prosecutors or perhaps by the next Congress of the United States is a work in progress. Cases revealing the instances of his placing foreign interests before those of the United States, always ultimately to serve his own greed or personal ambition, will likely be surfacing for years to come. But for historians and for students of facts that are already available to the public, there is no question Trump has met every necessary standard to define his behavior as traitorous. As his presidency has progressed, other scandals have manifested themselves, so many that they have blended together to sometimes obscure this core truth. But it has remained and day to day his actions have manifested his willingness to serve any country that might help him personally whether that country was the one he was elected to lead or not.

At its core, that definition depends on breaking faith with the people of the country he was chosen to lead. But the story of his betrayals began long before he took office and then continued and was compounded by his actions as president. While we may not yet have uncovered many of his crimes, the story we know so far is so outrageous and disturbing that it raises, and I believe answers, a question that has never before been presented in American history: Has America’s forty-fifth president been the greatest threat this country has faced during his tenure in office?

Here’s How the KGB Knew You’d Be a Traitor: an Exclusive Look at Its Recruitment Manual

Since Trump took office, the scope and scale of his cooperation with the Russians and their consequences have come into clearer focus, and his campaign’s abuses were compounded by crimes committed to obstruct justice to protect not just Trump and his team but the Russians, too. In fact, throughout Trump’s first term of office, he has repeatedly undertaken actions that protect Russia and Russians, advanced their interests, and thwarted the efforts of the U.S. intelligence, law-enforcement, diplomatic, and military communities as they sought to stop or counteract Russian wrongdoing. He has also sought the involvement of other governments in helping to serve his personal objectives, from Ukraine to China, placing personal interests above national interests, another form of grave betrayal. And, as of this current election campaign, despite the multiple investigations into the president’s activities and the serial revelations of his misdeeds and a formal congressional impeachment investigation, Donald Trump shows no signs of reversing or even moderating these efforts. Indeed, as the Ukraine and China instances reveal, he entered into his campaign for reelection as he did his first campaign—soliciting aid from foreign powers to help him win power at home and offering to them the benefits of his holding that office.

Even after the Mueller investigation into his 2016 ties with the Russians and the Trump impeachment hearings which centered around his abuse of power in shaking down the Ukrainian government in order to advance his personal political interests, much remains to be revealed by the investigations into the president’s involvement in and support of attacks against the United States, investigations that might not even be fully possible until he is out of office and those who are actively protecting him, from his attorney general to the Senate majority leader, are out of power or substantially weakened. But as of now, it is already clear that Russia’s interference in our election and Russia’s support of Trump has advanced major Russian objectives, including but not limited to unprecedented efforts by the U.S. president to weaken NATO and attack NATO allies; support for Russian positions in Syria; undercutting the standing of the United States in the world; fostering deep divisions within the United States; enabling further Russian cyber interventions in the United States; covering up past such interventions; embracing Russian leaders and representatives; supporting Russian efforts in Europe to promote right-wing nationalists who seek to undermine the European Union (EU); undoing sanctions against key Russian leaders, including those associated with the Russian invasion of Ukraine; and slow-walking other such sanctions or benefits to Russian rivals. Further, these goals have not just been achieved, they have been advanced by the president working in conjunction with a political party, the GOP, which has largely embraced Trump’s pro-Russia stance as its own and which is complicit with the president and the Russians in advancing the goals mentioned.

It is hard to imagine that the Russians ever felt their efforts to support a fringe and unlikely candidate for the U.S. presidency would produce such immense successes for them. Even were Donald Trump removed from office tomorrow or should he be defeated in November 2020, the Russian achievements have been so great that their efforts to put him in office and use him to advance their goals has to be seen as perhaps the most successful international intelligence operation of modern times.

Much has been written about Trump and about this case. Important, compelling books have been published that detail why he should be impeached, that enumerate his crimes, that reveal his character flaws and his incompetence as well as those of the friends and political advisers around him. But there is a special need to understand Trump’s betrayal from national security and foreign policy perspectives. After all, Trump is the only president in American history to have been impeached on national security grounds.

Beyond that, the damage done has been so great and the threats remaining are so profound that it is our duty as citizens to understand how they came to be and what their potential long-term significance is. It also means stepping back from the fray of the campaign and the numbing outrages and controversies of the news cycle and gaining some perspective. Nothing can help us get that perspective like gaining historical context, understanding where Trump-Russia ranks among the acts of treachery committed by Americans against America since the country was born over 240 years ago. We also need to understand how the country has historically viewed such crimes and how it has treated them in the past to place what has happened in perspective.

Trump is despicable, the least of us. But beyond his defective or perhaps even nonexistent character, there are the near-term and lasting consequences of his actions. We must understand these to reverse them, and we must understand how easily Russia achieved its objectives in order to prevent further such catastrophes in the future.

While having a president who is a traitor is unprecedented, there have been many Americans in our history who have, for money or ambition, misjudgment or spite, turned their backs on our flag and people. These offenses started early in the history of our nation. In fact, the concept of loyalty to a cause or country meant more to the founders because the tumultuous formative years of American history were so riven by plots and intrigues. When young George Washington made his first military forays during the French and Indian War, it was often unclear whose side indigenous tribes were on, and one of Washington’s initial defeats was marked by his signing an agreement with the French granting him and his troops free passage on terms so odious that its translator was for a period accused of treason, of betraying the British Crown, for whom Washington was fighting. Of course, the revolution itself also saw treachery and betrayal—and even some of those who appeared for a time to be fighting for American independence were themselves accused of being traitors to the king. The story of Benedict Arnold, once a trusted general and friend of Washington’s, is now taught to every schoolchild in the country and, indeed, is likely the very first incident most Americans think of when they hear the word “traitor.”

Arnold, of course, gave sensitive military information to the British and later fought alongside them, which is as clear a case of betraying the fledgling country as there could be. But when you ask how different it is from working with an adversary government when it is seeking to attack via a modern means—information warfare—the core institutions of American democracy, or later embracing policies on behalf of foreign sponsors that weaken and even seek the destruction of vital American alliances and to enhance the strategic position of enemies, even this first most egregious betrayal of Arnold’s does not seem so distant or different from what we have witnessed in our own time. Similarly, betraying foreign allies from Ukraine to Kurdistan, putting our vital interests at grave risk or, alternatively, looking the other way when a foreign potentate might murder an American journalist, all to advance his personal political or financial needs, carry with them echoes of past abuses, including many which were not so egregious as Trump’s.

The early years of the United States were marked by constant accusations of disloyalty between Federalists, who were accused of being too close to Britain; Jeffersonians, who were viewed as being too close to France; and all manner of plots and scandals associated with these divisions. Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson’s vice president, better known today as the man who killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel, was even part of a plot to form his own nation in among the territories of the Spanish in Louisiana and Mexico. He was arrested for treason in February of 1807 but was not convicted because of the constitutional requirement that treason require an “overt act,” the kind of technicality often used in Trump’s defense today. Burr, however, was viewed as a traitor the rest of his life, and he was forced to spend a number of years in Europe in exile before returning to New York to practice law, a profession apparently then as now open to people of dubious repute.

In the centuries since, the United States has witnessed outright sedition and the treason that brought about the Civil War, but even then, while a number of leaders of the Confederacy— from Jefferson Davis to Robert E. Lee— had held senior positions in the U.S. federal government, none, of course, operated at the level of Trump as president. In the past century, traitors have more often been prosecuted under espionage laws because the legal bar set to prove treason has been set so high, but there is no doubt that spies from the Rosenbergs to Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen were ultimately seen as traitors regardless of the terms of their convictions.

Gaining historical perspective also means considering the moment in history in which the Trump betrayals have taken place, the key actors in undertaking those betrayals, the specific charges that have been made against Trump and those close to him, and the consequences of the betrayal. In addition, we need to further understand the nature of modern warfare and why old definitions— while operative in legal definitions of what makes an “enemy”— may be misleading and provide cover for our adversaries at home and abroad.

It is also vital to understand the politics of our time not just because they created the opening for Trump but because they created a wall of defense behind which he and his coconspirators could act, thanks to the active complicity of the GOP leadership, the Republican-led Senate (and, for the first two years of Trump’s presidency, of the House of Representatives), and the penetration of Russian actors and money into the financing apparatus of the GOP and related organizations like the National Rifle Association (NRA). These things in turn created the sense of opportunity Trump saw in every foreign interaction, viewing them each in a personal, transactional light, as deals that he might strike for his benefit or to the detriment of his enemies.

It is my conviction, now that I have done the work described above in preparation of my book, Traitor that, upon reviewing the facts, the only objective conclusion that can be drawn is that wittingly or otherwise, Donald Trump; those closest to him in his White House, his campaign, and his family; and the leaders of the Republican Party in the United States have committed the highest-level, greatest, most damaging betrayal in the history of the country. They are traitors. And as of this writing they continue to damage the United States as no other actors in the world can. Indeed, the checks and balances against such behavior that were created by the Founders have essentially all failed. Indeed, those failures, which have subsequently sent the strong message that if a president controls the executive branch and the Senate and he has placed loyalists in key positions to defend him, then he in fact, our core principles be damned, is in fact above and beyond the reach of the law.

Some have called it the greatest scandal in American history. But that hardly does it justice. Unaddressed and unacknowledged, it could be the plot that brought down the greatest force for freedom and justice the world has ever known, the post–World War II Western alliance led by the United States of America. It could also, through the abuses of the presidents and his supporters and the techniques by which they both grabbed for power and sought to defend themselves, lead to the undoing of American democracy. Two and a half centuries after Benedict Arnold sought to ensure that America remained in a tyrant’s grasp, Donald Trump and his foreign sponsors may well have advanced that objective as Arnold could not.

Only one check remains to protect us from this fate. That is the election that will take place on November 3, an election that once again will occur with a presidential candidate, this time the incumbent, seeking the aid of foreign enemies to win. To fulfill our responsibilities as citizens, we must enter into such an election with a clear understanding of unprecedented threat posed by a president who is a traitor, and that is why I wrote Traitor: A History of American Betrayal from Benedict Arnold to Donald Trump.

Martha McSally’s Humiliation, and the Republican Party’s

Bloomberg

Martha McSally’s Humiliation, and the Republican Party’s

Francis Wilkinson                 November 2, 2020
Martha McSally’s Humiliation, and the Republican Party’s

 

(Bloomberg Opinion) — If the degradation of the Republican Party were cast as a morality tale, the lead character might be Senator Martha McSally of Arizona. To say that McSally was once impressive undersells her biography. To say she is now humiliated undersells her shame.

In the highly likely event that McSally is defeated tomorrow by her Democratic opponent, former astronaut Mark Kelly, her electoral defeat will be an anticlimax. McSally had been sinking since the toxic dawn of Donald Trump’s presidency, but she hit bottom last week when she publicly debased herself before a man who could never equal her own service and accomplishments.

McSally served in the Air Force for two decades, leaving the service in 2010 as a colonel, and was the first woman to fly combat missions and command a fighter squadron. She was gutsy on the ground as well, at one point suing the Department of Defense over a policy that required servicewomen stationed in Saudi Arabia to cover themselves in an abaya outside military bases.

In addition to her degree in biology from the Air Force Academy, McSally has a master’s in public policy from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. She was elected to the House of Representatives in 2014, serving two terms before losing a Senate race to Democrat Kyrsten Sinema. In 2018, Governor Doug Ducey appointed her to fill the seat of John McCain after his death. On Tuesday, she faces voters in a special election to fill the two years remaining in her term.

In 2016, McSally, like many in her party, could still read a moral compass. She made it clear that she would not endorse Trump. She regarded his Russia-friendly attacks on NATO with skepticism. She expressed concern about the contempt with which Trump spoke of “veterans and Hispanics and women and others. That’s just not how leaders carry themselves.” When the “Access Hollywood” tape was made public in October, McSally responded on Twitter: “Trump’s comments are disgusting. Joking about sexual assault is unacceptable. I’m appalled.”

That was then. By 2020, McSally was supporting Trump’s position 90% of the time. She voted to exclude witnesses and evidence in Trump’s impeachment trial. She highlighted, for cheap applause from the MAGA crowd, her Trumpy assault on a respected journalist with a long track record of level-headed integrity.

Then, last Wednesday, the woman who fought her way to respect as a leader of men in the Air Force, who demanded respect for women in Saudi Arabia, and who respected herself too much in 2016 to endorse Donald Trump, appeared at a rally with the president in Goodyear, Arizona. Trump, having concluded that McSally is insufficiently popular to boost him in the state, didn’t even bother feigning respect; he treated McSally like, well, a dog.

“Martha, just come up fast. Fast. Fast,” Trump called, deploying his hand in rapid motion to emphasize just how quickly she should heel. “Come on. Quick. You got one minute! One minute, Martha! They don’t want to hear this, Martha. Come on. Let’s go. Quick, quick, quick. Come on. Let’s go.”

It was a grotesque performance, even by Trump’s standards. McSally made it worse. “I’m coming!” she said. “Thank you, President Trump!”

McSally has spoken publicly of being sexually abused by a high school coach. Her lawsuit in Saudi Arabia specifically objected to women being subservient to men. Yet with her political career on the line, she proved no different than most of her fellow Republicans in her willingness to accept personal and public humiliation from the president of the United States.

It may be too late for the colonel and senator to reclaim her lost dignity. The rest of the country still has one last shot.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Francis Wilkinson writes about U.S. politics and domestic policy for Bloomberg Opinion. He was previously executive editor of the Week, a writer for Rolling Stone, a communications consultant and a political media strategist.

For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion

Meghan McCain predicts ‘hysteria from the Trump family’ if the president loses the upcoming election

Meghan McCain predicts ‘hysteria from the Trump family’ if the president loses the upcoming election

 

'The View' co-host Meghan McCain tweeted that she expects 'hysteria from the Trump family' if the president doesn't win Tuesday's election. (Photo: Lou Rocco/ABC via Getty Images)
“The View” co-host Meghan McCain tweeted that she expects “hysteria from the Trump family” if the president doesn’t win Tuesday’s election. (Photo: Lou Rocco/ABC via Getty Images)

 

Meghan McCain isn’t hesitating to reveal what she thinks may happen as a result of Tuesday’s presidential election.

The View co-host, who recently welcomed her first child, took to Twitter on Sunday to share some memories about her late father Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential run, as well as her predictions for what may happen if President Donald Trump doesn’t win reelection.

“When my dad lost in ‘08 [to Barack Obama], he huddled my brothers and sisters in a corner and said buck up, we’re the luckiest people in the entire world and we’re not going to feel sorry for ourselves, we made history,” McCain tweeted  about her father, who died in 2018. “He then thanked the Secret Service and told them to go home to their family.”

McCain doesn’t expect Trump to handle a potential loss quite so graciously, however.

“I predict the extreme polar opposite, insane level of meltdown, blame shifting and absolute bedlam anger and hysteria from the Trump family if they lose….” she said in a follow-up tweet.

Amid concern that solid election results could take days to process, there has been intense speculation that Trump may be unwilling to accept a defeat by former Vice President Joe Biden. A new report from Axios claims that the president has told multiple people he’ll declare his own victory on Tuesday night if it looks like he’s “ahead.” When asked for comment, Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said, “This is nothing but people trying to create doubt about a Trump victory. When he wins, he’s going to say so.”

McCain’s criticism of the Trump family isn’t unexpected. A vocal critic of the president thanks to his comments about her late father, she took on former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders back in September in the wake of an article in The Atlantic that alleged Trump called fallen veterans “losers” and “suckers.”

“This never stops being incredibly painful, triggering, and it rips off new layers of grief that wreak havoc on my life,” McCain tweeted at the time. “I wouldn’t wish any of it on my worst enemy. I truly pray for peace for my family, our grief and for this country.”

When Sanders appeared on The View, McCain was quick to make her opinions clear.

“The problem with this story is it seems like something that he would do,” McCain told Sanders. “I know for me and my brothers who serve, we do not feel respected. We are a military family that does not feel respected or appreciated by this president.”

A longtime friend of the Biden family, McCain has expressed support for the Biden campaign for quite some time, despite being a Republican. Her mother Cindy McCain has officially endorsed Biden ahead of Tuesday’s election, previously telling CNN’s Brianna Keilar that she thinks her husband would be “very disappointed, in fact, I know he would be,” in the current political climate.

“He would be saddened by the digression that these conversations and these debates have taken, and also saddened that we’re so disoriented within the world right now,” Cindy McCain said. “As you know, he concentrated on helping the little guy and helping the people that were desperate and being wronged by either their government or other people.”

‘Crossroads of the climate crisis’: swing state Arizona grapples with deadly heat

The Guardian

‘Crossroads of the climate crisis’: swing state Arizona grapples with deadly heat

Maanvi Singh and Lauren Gambino in Phoenix.  November 1, 2020
'Crossroads of the climate crisis': swing state Arizona grapples with deadly heat

 

Even now, Ivan Moore can’t think why his father didn’t didn’t tell anyone that the air conditioning in their house was busted. “I honestly don’t know what was going through his mind,” he said.

That week three years ago, temperatures in Phoenix, Arizona were forecasted to top 115F (46C). Moore, his wife and two children went to the mountains for a camping trip, and his dad Gene, stayed behind. A few days later, Gene died.

The air conditioning had been blowing hot air. “He’d opened a window but it was too hot,” Moore said. “My dad’s heart basically gave out on him.”

Phoenix – America’s hottest city – is getting hotter and hotter, and Moore’s father is one of the hundreds of Arizonans who have succumbed to the desert heat in recent years.

In August this year, Maricopa county, which encompasses Phoenix, recorded 1,000 Covid-19 deaths. That same month, the county was investigating more than 260 heat-related deaths.

This summer, temperatures here stayed above 90F (32C), even at night, for 28 days straight, with the scorching weather in July and August breaking records. It was so hot and dry that towering saguaro cactuses that dot the landscape began to topple over and die.

At the same time, wildfires across the western US this year cast a foreboding orange glow over the region and clouded Phoenix communities, already breathing some of the highest concentrations of toxic pollution in the nation, with even more smoke.

“I grew up in the desert, in the heat,” Moore said. “But I think about what it’s going to be like in another five years, in 10 years.”

The thought has been weighing on him – and many other Arizonans – as they cast their ballots ahead of next week’s elections. Even amid a global pandemic, and the economic catastrophe it has triggered, polls find that Americans increasingly cite the climate emergency as a major concern. That’s especially true in regions like Maricopa, where the crisis is already having deadly effects.

Once a stronghold of western conservatism, Maricopa county has been slowly undergoing a political transformation – and has become one of the fiercely contested election battlegrounds in the nation.

Asked to choose between a Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden, who recognizes global heating as an emergency, and a Republican, Donald Trump, who has called it a “hoax”, a growing number of voters in the Valley of the Sun say they are seeking leadership that will address climate and help their desert home survive an increasingly precarious future.

‘The crossroads of the climate crisis’

“We are a desert community,” said Laura Jimena Dent, the executive director of the Arizona-based environmental justice non-profit Chispa. “We are literally at the crossroads of the climate crisis.”

Since 1865, the temperatures in Maricopa have risen by nearly 2C. And since the 1950s, the water level in the region’s well has dropped by 125ft. Even in a politically divided swing state, that’s hard for anyone to ignore. A recent survey found that nearly three-quarters of Arizonans “agree” or “strongly agree” that the federal government “needs to do more to combat climate change”.

Even after the coronavirus pandemic hit this year, when researchers at Yale university conducted an annual survey of voters across the country, climate change went up on a list of voter priorities.

For the first time in American history, climate change has reached the very top echelons of voting issues

Anthony Leiserowitz, Yale University

“You see that reflected in how much political leaders – especially Democrats – have been talking about climate change this election,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, an expert on public opinion of climate change at Yale University.

Whereas liberal Democrats ranked climate change as their second most important issue out of 30, moderate Democrats rank it 8th, and moderate Republicans rank it somewhere in the middle.

But in the US, and in Maricopa county, most voters agree climate change is happening, and they want lawmakers to do something about it.

“For the first time in American history, climate change has reached the very top echelons of voting issues,” Leiserowitz said.

Indeed, just a few weeks ago, Americans heard Trump and Biden respond to the first question about the climate crisis at a presidential debate in 20 years. While Trump flatly refused to acknowledge that climate change was fueling wildfires across the west, Biden touted a $2tn plan to invest in green infrastructure, emphasizing the “millions of good-paying jobs” that his climate proposals could create.

Responding to the wildfires ripping across California in a speech earlier this summer, Biden also cast the climate crisis as a threat to the safety and security of America’s suburbs, flipping an attack the president has leveled against him to appeal to voters in regions like Maricopa – a sprawling suburban oasis in the desert.

“If you give a climate arsonist four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised if we have more of America ablaze?” he asked.

Similarly, in a heated debate between the state’s US Senate candidates, the incumbent Republican Martha McSally, who serves on the Senate energy and natural resources committee and is a close ally of the president, acknowledged “the climate is changing”, but derided any “heavy-handed approach” to addressing it.

Meanwhile, the Democrat Mark Kelly, a former astronaut, mused about how fragile the planet looks from low-Earth orbit. “There is no planet B,” he said. “We have to do a better job taking care of this planet.”

The stark contrast between the parties’ stances can help explain why voters in Maricopa have been increasingly repelled by the Republicans, said Josh Ulibarri, a Democratic pollster based in Phoenix.

Conservatives here have been slowly leaving a Republican party that has grown increasingly extreme and rightwing. “Climate is part of that,” Ulibarri said.

Fifteen years ago, Arizona was one of the first states to develop a climate action plan, and climate change – at least in this region – was a bipartisan issue. John McCain, the state’s late senior senator, was one of the few Republican lawmakers in Washington DC to support climate change legislation. But as national and local politics became more polarized, Republican politicians moved right.

As a result, “college-educated voters and women voters have moved away from Republicans because they don’t believe in science”, Ulibarri said.Many independents recoiled, as well.

Moore falls in that category. “Normally I go through, and I don’t care if candidates are Republicans or Democrats – I do my research on whose viewpoints I agree with,” he said. “But right now, the GOP – not Republicans but the party itself – has gone too far, too far right. They’ve been ridiculous with the choices they’re making – the party needs a reset.”

Among other things, “we need our leaders figuring out: how do we live in a world that’s going to get even hotter?” he added. This year, he picked Democrats up and down the ballot.

Ultimately, Republicans’ resistance to acknowledging and addressing climate change will hurt them politically, said Jeff Flake, a former Arizona senator. “I do think over time it really makes it difficult to attract, particularly, the younger generation, millennials, Gen Xers, and whoever else, when we don’t have rational policies on climate change,” said Flake, a Republican who has been critical of Trump’s politics.

With so much else going on, he said that while he doesn’t see climate change playing a big role in this election, he imagines it will be hard to ignore in future ones.

‘We’re building the political power’

Like many areas of the country, in Maricopa, poor neighborhoods and neighborhoods where Latino and Black families live are worst affected by both the heat and the bad air. Across the US, young voters and Latino voters are especially likely to prioritize climate action, polling shows.

“Latinos are more convinced climate change is real and that it’s human caused, more worried about it, and more supportive of action than any other voting bloc,” said Leiserowitz of Yale.

In Maricopa, where about one third of the county’s 4.5 million residents identify as Latino, environmental justice activists are at the forefront of efforts to galvanize voters to elect environmentally minded candidates.

“Our focus is on getting young people, Latino people, people of color across our state who have traditionally been less engaged in the political process,” Dent said. “We are making calls, we are sending mail and digital ads, text messages and handwritten postcards.”

Translating concern about climate change into votes has proved challenging in the past, but as the region grows hotter, and more polluted, “we’re building the political power”, she said.

The county earned an “F” rating this year from the American Lung Association. The cars and trucks that congest the city’s sprawling highways have made Phoenix the seventh-most ozone-polluted metropolitan area in the country. Here, the heat speeds up production of the toxic ozone particles, which can damage the lungs and lead to serious, even deadly respiratory issues.

“For a decade, we in our communities have been raising our voices about these issues,” said Blanca Abarca, 54, a community activist.

Abarca lives in a largely Latino neighborhood in south Phoenix located downwind of an industrial dump the EPA has found is leeching “low levels” of toxic compounds and heavy metals including arsenic, barium, mercury, and nickel. She, her husband and their teenage daughter have MacGyvered their whole house to cope with the heat.

They rely on a swamp cooler, ventilators on their roof and ceiling, and the trees they planted all around their house. They’ve got an AC unit – but they hardly use it. The high electricity bills could send them into debt.

“I tell people who can vote to do it for the community – to elect leaders who are going to better this great country, and for the future of our children,” she said while on a break from gardening at Spaces of Opportunity, a community farm in south Phoenix where she and many others in the neighborhood come for a respite from heat.

To be clear, she added, that is not how she would characterize the current president.

Her efforts – and those of other progressive Latino activists – have been paying off. Young Latino voters have been casting ballots in record numbers in recent years, helping elect Democratic lawmakers in local and statewide elections.

In 2019, the Democrat Kate Gallego was elected mayor of Phoenix – in part thanks to a wave of young, progressive Latino voters. Gallego has a bachelor’s degree in environmental science.

“I grew up with asthma. And as you spend time wheezing by the track, it gives you an opportunity to reflect on air quality,” she said. Since taking office, Gallego has focused on developing better public transportation infrastructure to reduce the number of vehicles on the road. She’s also overseeing the development of a network of “cool corridors” – to ensure that no resident is more than five minutes from water and shade.

In another sign of progress, Arizona utility regulators this week approved a plan to transition to 100% carbon-free energy sources – such as solar and nuclear energy – by 2050. Two Republicans on the utilities board voted with a Democrat to get the measure passed.

In the desert, “we just have to take climate change very seriously”, Gallego said.

“And, you know, I have a father who fancies himself a political consultant,” she added. “And he told me if I can just do something about the summer heat, I will definitely be re-elected.”

Trump has a plan to steal the election — in fact, he has a bunch of them

Trump has a plan to steal the election — in fact, he has a bunch of them

Voter suppression, legal dirty tricks and right-wing militias: Trump’s list of 2020 tactics is becoming clear

By Amanda Marcotte              September 3, 2020

 

Trump has a plan to steal the election — in fact, he has a bunch of them | Salon.comDonald Trump, Bill Barr, Louis DeJoy, and Kyle Rittenhouse (background) (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)

Donald Trump knows he is unlikely to win a fair election in 2020. But his strategies to cheat are so numerous and scattershot — did you catch that story about how acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf blocked a report about Russian propaganda? — that it’s tempting to take comfort in the hope that he has no overarching strategy to fake or steal a second term.In truth, however, the sheer number of schemes in play is all the more reason to worry, because it shows Trump’s team is flexible and capable of adapting to changing circumstances. Worse yet, it shows they have a number of fallback plans. If one effort fails, then another effort might just work. Attacking our democracy on multiple fronts depletes the resources (time, money, energy) of their opponents, making it likelier that one effort will break through and be successful.

There is good news, however. A combination of Trump’s big mouth, the continued courage of whistleblowers and the fact that Republicans have to conduct a lot of their scheming through the media means that, with two months to go, Trump’s plans to distort, subvert or flat-out steal the election have come into view. Democrats, and anyone else who still believes in democracy, can avoid being caught flat-footed. What’s required is to take all this seriously, instead of hiding behind increasingly foolish hopes that it can’t happen here.

Because folks inevitably object to any proposal that Trump is scheming, on the grounds that he’s too dumb to pull any such thing off, let’s just get this out of the way: Trump doesn’t need to be smart. He just needs to surround himself with smart but immoral people. There’s significant evidence he has done just that.

After months of reading reports on Trump’s various schemes to steal the election, I’ve outlined below roughly how I think they see this playing out, both on the legal and political fronts. This isn’t to scare readers, it’s to help us all be better prepared to fight back.

1. Keep as many Democrats as possible from voting in the first place. 

Unfortunately, this is the strategy that will likely be most effective, as it builds on years of Republican voter suppression tactics that predate Trump and don’t depend on him. For example Georgia has reportedly purged 200,000 voters off the rolls by claiming they had moved when they likely had not.

Still, Trump has put his own spin on it by exploiting the coronavirus crisis that he caused through a combination of negligence and open malice. Huge numbers of Americans, especially Democrats, plan to vote by mail and Trump clearly plans to keep them from doing it, aided by Postmaster General (and Trump mega-donor) Louis DeJoy, who took the helm of the Postal Service over the summer and immediately got busy slowing down the mail. Republicans are also fighting a legal battle to keep states from implementing measures that make mail-in voting more efficient.

2. Declare victory on Election Day before final results are tallied. 

Trump has made public statements arguing that the winner should be declared on the night of November 3rd, even though it’s far more likely that the election can’t be called for at least a few days, until the mail-in ballots have been counted. Democrats reasonably believe, therefore, that Trump, perhaps aided by Fox News, will declare victory before the votes are counted. Having established his claim to “victory,” which will snag the headlines, Trump will then paint efforts to get all votes counted as usurpation by Joe Biden and the Democrats.

3. Disqualify as many mail-in ballots as possible.

Trump has been on a media war to stoke the idea that mail-in ballots are “fraudulent,” even going so far as to tell his own voters to vote twice, once by mail and again in person, implying this will “prove” that mail-in ballots are frauds. Now Attorney General Bill Barr is joining in, shamelessly lying to both journalists and the House Judiciary Committee about “fraud” being rampant with mail-in voting. (It’s not.)

Likely building on the legal precedent set by the Supreme Court in 2000, which declared George W. Bush to declare victory without a full and fair vote recount in Florida, Trump and Barr will likely pull as many legal shenanigans as they can to get as many mail-in ballots as possible thrown out in the days after the election. With the courts stacked with Republican appointees — and specifically Trump appointees — there’s a real danger that many of these legal challenges will work.

4. Build an ad hoc right-wing militia to intimidate election officials or pro-democracy protesters. 

It’s not a mystery why Trump, Fox News and the White House are fashioning Kyle Rittenhouse — a 17-year-old charged with a double homicide for shooting anti-racism protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin — into a hero. It’s to encourage other Trump supporters to take up arms and join up with militia groups that are being hastily organized on social media. Right now these gangs of armed right-wingers are focused on intimidating Black Lives Matter protesters and getting into street fights with leftists, but once they’re established, their attentions can be easily redirected to other goals by Trump through tweets and other public statements.

That’s a useful tool for Trump to have if, for instance, he decides it’s necessary to keep election officials in swing districts from finishing a count of mail-in ballots. If that sounds outrageous, note that Trump’s friend Roger Stone — recently released from prison after Trump commuted his sentence – used exactly this tactic with the infamous “Brooks Brothers riots”  used to stop vote counting in Miami in the 2000 election. That time it was done without guns, but now Trump’s goons have normalized the idea of “protesting” by brandishing weapons.

There’s also good reason to be concerned about right-wing militias being used to suppress pro-democracy protests that will likely break out if and when Trump declares himself the winner and starts the legal maneuvers aimed at keeping all votes from being counted..

5. If all else fails, reject the election results by declaring the election “rigged” and refuse to leave office. 

The good news is that this strategy is the least likely to work, because the Constitution is quite clear on the timeline and methodology for the Electoral College to convene and to declare a new president. If the votes are counted and Biden is the winner, there is not much Trump can do, in terms of legal dirty tricks, to keep the Electoral College from doing its job. Furthermore, the Constitution is clear that Trump’s term ends at noon Eastern time on Jan. 20, and whoever has been duly elected becomes president, with or without a Supreme Court justice administering the oath amid all the pomp and circumstance. (If there is no duly elected president or vice president on Jan. 20, the speaker of the House would become president. I think it’s safe to assume Republicans would prefer President Biden to that scenario.)

The bad news is that, by the time all that happens, Trump and Fox News will likely have whipped Republican voters into such a frenzy over the “rigged” election that they may well conclude violence is justified to keep their man in office.

If that seems implausible, well, the reality is that most Republican voters have already embraced this fascist viewpoint, as Eric Levitz of New York magazine detailed in a disturbing article this week.

A YouGov poll taken in January 2020 shows that a majority of Republican voters agree that the “traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it” and only 22% were willing to disagree. Similarly, 41% believed that “a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands” and only 22% disagreed. The rest were “unsure,” which likely means they will either softly support such violence or at least will do nothing to stop it.

That’s all very depressing, and I won’t try to put a positive spin on it just to make anyone feel better. To quote Michelle Obama, “It is what it is.”

None of this is a reason to give into despair and quit fighting, however. On the contrary, one massive advantage that those who still believe in democracy have is that now we know what Trump, who loves to run his mouth, is planning.

Democrats seem cognizant of the problem. Biden has repeatedly said that he believes Trump plans to steal the election, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has indicated that she knows it will be a struggle to get trump to accept electoral defeat. During the Democratic National Convention, multiple speakers emphasized the importance of voting early, to forestall Trump’s efforts to steal the election.

Whether or not Democrats have a plan to respond to all these possible scenarios is still obscure. We can hope that means that, unlike Trump, they’re not tipping their hands publicly about what they intend to do.

It’s going to be a long two months. But at least we know, roughly but with a pretty high degree of confidence, how Trump and his allies see this playing out. Now it’s on the rest of us to stop it from happening.

Amanda Marcotte is a senior politics writer at Salon and the author of “Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself.”

GOP lawyer: ‘My party is destroying itself on the Altar of Trump’

MSNBC – MaddowBlog

GOP lawyer: ‘My party is destroying itself on the Altar of Trump’

The nation’s leading Republican election lawyer is publicly warning his GOP brethren about the dangers of their misguided partnership with Donald Trump.
A gavel sits on a desk inside the Court of Appeals at the new Ralph L. Carr Colorado Judicial Center, which celebrated its official opening on Monday Jan. 14, 2013, in Denver.

A gavel sits on a desk inside the Court of Appeals at the new Ralph L. Carr Colorado Judicial Center, which celebrated its official opening on Monday Jan. 14, 2013, in Denver.Brennan Linsley / AP

Election lawyers are generally not widely recognized by the public. That’s not surprising: they tend to do their work in courtrooms and boardrooms, far from the public spotlight, so these attorneys rarely become household names.

With this in mind, the typical American voter probably has no idea who Ben Ginsberg is, though it’s also probably fair to say Republican officials know him and his work extremely well.

Remember the Bush v. Gore case? Ginsberg was the Bush campaign’s general counsel. Remember the Swiftboat vets who smeared John Kerry in 2004? Ginsberg helped lead their legal team, too. Remember the Franken-Coleman Senate contest in Minnesota that took months to resolve in 2009? Ginsberg was the Republican incumbent’s lawyer. Remember Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign? Ginsberg was his lawyer, too.

I mention this pedigree to provide some context to the GOP attorney’s latest efforts. Because when the nation’s preeminent Republican election attorney publicly condemns his party’s antics, it’s best not to look past his concerns too quickly.

One of the first hints that Ginsberg was displeased with his party’s anti-voting efforts came in early September, when he wrote a Washington Post op-ed, criticizing Donald Trump’s unsubtle attempts to “undermine confidence in the credibility of election results,” and explaining that recent GOP claims about voter fraud are baseless.

Three weeks later, Ginsberg wrote another Washington Post op-ed, arguing that Trump’s refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power was problematic for everyone, including members of his own party.

Last week, Ginsberg co-authored another Washington Post op-ed, defending the U.S. electoral system from Trump’s attacks, and arguing, “[T]he president’s attempt to undermine the election is a self-serving assault on a fundamental American system. It should be condemned across party lines.”

And for good measure, Ginsberg has yet another Washington Post op-ed in today’s print edition, which is arguably the hardest hitting opinion piece to date.

President Trump has failed the test of leadership. His bid for reelection is foundering. And his only solution has been to launch an all-out, multimillion-dollar effort to disenfranchise voters — first by seeking to block state laws to ease voting during the pandemic, and now, in the final stages of the campaign, by challenging the ballots of individual voters unlikely to support him. This is as un-American as it gets.

The piece went on to argue that the incumbent president’s re-election strategy is increasingly built on a foundation of “disenfranchising” just enough voters to win.

Ginsberg concludes, “My party is destroying itself on the Altar of Trump. Republican elected officials, party leaders and voters must recognize how harmful this is to the party’s long-term prospects. My fellow Republicans, look what we’ve become. It is we who must fix this. Trump should not be reelected. Vote, but not for him.”

Remember, this isn’t just some random GOP attorney who’s worked for a few candidates. We’re talking about the nation’s leading Republican election lawyer for decades, publicly warning his GOP brethren about the dangers of their misguided partnership with Donald Trump.

I’ve spent months marveling at the number of Republicans who’ve stepped up to denounce Trump, endorse Joe Biden, or both. Seeing Ben Ginsberg join the ranks is among the most surprising to date.

John Oliver Delivers Damning Indictment Of Trump Just Hours Before Election

John Oliver Delivers Damning Indictment Of Trump Just Hours Before Election

Ed Mazza, Overnight Editor, HuffPost            

John Oliver can’t believe there are still voters willing to give President Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt about his handling of the coronavirus pandemic despite the United States having the most cases and most deaths.

With less than 36 hours to go before the start of the election, the “Last Week Tonight” host delivered a 21-minute indictment of many of the ways the Trump administration has failed the nation throughout the crisis. He also highlighted one moment that revealed Trump’s “borderline sociopathic” inability to show any degree of empathy for victims and survivors.

As first responders gathered in the Oval Office, Ernest Grant ― president of the American Nurses Association ― told Trump about the post-traumatic stress those working on the frontlines of the pandemic were experiencing. Trump barely listened, then started passing out commemorative pens to everyone in the room.

“I know after four years it is hard for anything Trump does to shock you anymore but it is worth making sure that that still does,” Oliver said. “…He wasn’t even listening. He was just sitting there, waiting for his turn to speak so he could do his pen thing.”

Oliver added:

“Is there anything more grim than that? I mean I guess you could’ve not offered them pens. But would that have been worse? Better? It’s honestly difficult to say. It’s even more difficult to write a joke of.”

Then Oliver offered a message for those who think Trump’s been a boon for entertainers such as himself.

″‘Oh, Trump must be great for you comedians, right?’” he said. “Yeah, not really. This has been a fucking nightmare!”