Hakeem Jeffries: The Democrat who could replace Nancy Pelosi
Sam Cabral – BBC News, Washington – November 18, 2022
Hakeem Jeffries
US lawmaker Hakeem Jeffries has formally launched a bid to succeed Nancy Pelosi as the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives.
The New York congressman, 52, has served in the fifth-highest rank of Democratic leadership since 2019.
If Mr Jeffries ascends to the top spot, held by Mrs Pelosi for two decades, he will be the first black person to lead a party in the US Congress.
But he would be minority leader, and not the speaker.
Republicans regained a slim majority in the House of Representatives, the lower chamber of Congress, in last week’s midterm elections.
California Republican Kevin McCarthy, who currently serves as minority leader, has been nominated as the party’s choice to be House speaker.
In a letter on Friday, Mr Jeffries asked his Democratic colleagues for their support “as we once again prepare to meet the moment”.
All eyes were on Mrs Pelosi, 82, a day earlier, as she took to the chamber floor to announce her retirement.
“The hour has come for a new generation to lead the Democratic caucus,” she said.
The move appeared to be co-ordinated with Mrs Pelosi’s top two deputies – Steny Hoyer, 83, and Jim Clyburn, 82 – who quickly followed suit by releasing statements on their future plans.
Both men offered endorsements for Mr Jeffries, with Mr Clyburn writing that his focus was “doing whatever I can to assist our new generation of Democratic Leaders, which I hope to be Hakeem Jeffries, Katherine Clark, and Pete Aguilar”.
Congresswoman Katherine Clark, 59, of Massachusetts is tipped to run for the post of whip, the number two Democratic leadership job. Pete Aguilar, 43, of California, currently vice-chairman of the caucus, is being talked about as successor to Mr Jeffries for caucus chairman.
Mr Jeffries, for his part, quickly lauded Mrs Pelosi as “the most accomplished Speaker in American history”, writing that she had been “the steady hand on the gavel during some of the most turbulent times the nation has ever confronted”.
The leadership shuffle may help quell complaints from some Democratic voters that their party’s leaders are too old.
Congresswoman Katherine Clark joined Congress in 2013
But the trio of young up-and-comers is closely aligned with the party’s establishment wing, and Mr Jeffries in particular has been known to clash on occasion with his party’s left flank.
A lawyer who was born and raised in the Brooklyn borough of New York, he has represented the state’s eighth congressional district in the House since 2013.
He once paid tribute on the House floor to rapper The Notorious B.I.G., who was born as Christopher Wallace in Mr Jeffries’ district and gunned down in Los Angeles in 1997.
On the 20th anniversary of his death, the congressman said that the hip hop artist represented “the classic embodiment of the American Dream” and rapped some lyrics from his 1994 hit single Juicy.
In 2020, Mr Jeffries served as one of seven Democratic managers at President Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial.
With Democrats retaining power in the upper chamber of Congress, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer is likely to remain at his post. That could mean the Democratic leaders in both chambers of Congress will hail from the state of New York.
Katie Porter wins re-election in California after days of counting
Rebecca Shabad and David K. Li –November 18, 2022
Graeme Sloan
WASHINGTON — Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif., the whiteboard-wielding lawmaker and progressive star, won her re-election race, NBC News projected on Friday.
After days of vote counting, Porter staved off a challenge from former state Assemblyman Scott Baugh, a Republican, to win a third term in Congress.
President Joe Biden called Porter on Wednesday night to congratulate her on the victory.
Porter, 48, is best known for viral videos of her sharp questioning of witnesses testifying before Congress. The former law school professor often used a dry-erase board to list user-friendly facts and figures to make her point.
She has served in the House since 2019, representing the 45th Congressional District, and is deputy chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
In the 2022 midterm election cycle, Porter raised more than $23 million compared to Baugh, who raised more than $2 million, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
Baugh, 60, served as an assemblyman in California’s Legislature from 1995 to 2000. During his last year in the statehouse, he was the assembly’s GOP leader. More recently, Baugh was chairman of the Orange County Republican Party, from 2004 to 2015.
The 47th Congressional District in coastal Orange County between Long Beach and San Clemente was once been dominated by Republicans but now is more mixed.
The race for the new 47th Congressional District seat had been listed as a “toss up” by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.
Arizona county board delays certifying election results
Bob Christie – November 18, 2022
FILE – Maricopa County, Ariz., ballots cast in the 2020 general election are examined and recounted by contractors working for Florida-based company, Cyber Ninjas, in Phoenix on May 6, 2021. At least one recount will be on tap in Arizona after the counting from the Nov. 8, 2022, midterm elections ends. Once Arizona’s counties certify their results in the coming days as scheduled, a recount will be triggered in at least one statewide race. (AP Photo/Matt York, Pool, File) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
PHOENIX (AP) — The board overseeing a southeastern Arizona county whose Republican leaders had hoped to recount all Election Day ballots on Friday delayed certifying the results of last week’s vote after hearing from a trio of conspiracy theorists who alleged that counting machines were not certified.
The three men, or some combination of them, have filed at least four cases raising similar claims before the Arizona Supreme Court since 2021 seeking to have the state’s 2020 election results thrown out. The court has dismissed all of them for lack of evidence, waiting too long after the election was certified or asking for relief that could not be granted, in increasingly harsh language.
But Tom Rice, Brian Steiner and Daniel Wood managed to persuade the two Republicans who control the Cochise County board of supervisors that their claims were valid enough for them to delay the certification until a Nov. 28 deadline.
They claimed the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission allowed certifications for testing companies to lapse, and that voided the certifications of vote tabulation equipment used across the state.
That came despite testimony from the state’s elections director that the machines and the testing company were indeed certified.
“The equipment used in Cochise County is properly certified under both federal and state laws and requirements,” state Elections Director Kori Lorick told the board. “The claims that the SLI testing labs were not properly accredited are false.”
The move is the latest drama in the Republican-heavy county in recent weeks, which started when GOP board members Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd voted to have all the ballots in last week’s election counted by hand to determine if the machine counts were accurate.
Crosby also defended a lawsuit he and Judd filed against the county elections director earlier this week seeking to force the hand-count. They dropped the case against Lisa Marra on Wednesday.
“If our presenters’ request is met by the proof that our machines are indeed legally and lawfully accredited, then indeed we should accept the results,” Crosby said. “However, if the machines have not been lawfully certificated, then the converse is also true. We cannot verify this election now.”
Crosby and Judd then voted to delay certification, with Crosby saying he believed Wood, Steiner and Rice needed to be provided proof since they were “the experts.”
Democratic Supervisor Ann English was powerless to overrule them.
The delay potentially jeopardizes state certification, set for Dec. 5, and at least one statewide recount.
Lorick issued a statement after the vote vowing legal action to force the board to accept the results. Under Arizona law the formal election canvass can’t be changed by the elected county boards — their only role is to accept the numbers as they are tallied by their elections departments.
“If they fail to do so, the Secretary (of State) will use all available legal remedies to compel compliance with Arizona law and protect Cochise County voters’ rights to have their votes counted,” Lorick said.
All 15 Arizona counties face the same Nov. 28 deadline, but there is no sign others are considering similar defiance.
Once the state certifies the results Dec. 5, there will be a recount in at least one statewide race.
That contest, between Republican Abraham Hamadeh and Democrat Kris Mayes for attorney general, is so close that a recount is certain. As of Friday night, Mayes was less than 600 votes ahead with fewer ballots remaining to be counted than the margin for a mandatory recount, which will be about 12,500 votes.
“It’s going to be close, and every vote matters,” Mayes said in a brief interview. “And obviously we’re headed into a recount, one way or another.”
One other statewide race also is within the margin for a recount, but incumbent Superintendent of Public Instruction Kathy Hoffman conceded to Republican Tom Horne on Thursday. Horne is a former schools chief who served two years as attorney general before losing the 2014 primary. He was more than 9,000 votes ahead on Friday.
Horne criticized Hoffman for embracing progressive teaching and promised to shut down any hint of “critical race theory,” which is not taught in state schools but is a hot-button issue for social conservatives.
Judd had said Wednesday she would move to clear the way for the state recount.
“We’ve had to step back from everything we were trying to do and say, OK, we’ve got to let this play out,” Judd told The Associated Press. “Because it’s the last thing we want to do to get in (Marra’s) way.”
There has been no evidence of widespread fraud or manipulation of voting machines in 2020 or during this year’s midterm elections.
Arizona recount laws were changed this year. The previous margin for a mandatory recount was 1/10 of 1%. It is now 0.5%.
This story was first published on November 18, 2022. It was updated on November 19, 2022 to correct the spelling of the name of the Democratic attorney general candidate to Kris Mayes.
With new standards draft, critics say Virginia’s Youngkin wants to rewrite history
Marquise Francis, National Reporter – November 18, 2022
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin at a campaign rally in Smithfield, Va., on Oct. 27. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
A number of cultural groups, historians and Virginia residents are sounding the alarm about historical inaccuracies and oversights in the latest draft of history standards for K-12 education in the state proposed last week by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
Chief among their frustrations is the draft’s omission of teaching about the ongoing legacy of slavery and the Civil War in Virginia today, as well as LGBTQ history. Critics believe this shows that the governor is using his political power to rewrite history and downplay unsavory episodes in American history.
“The Youngkin administration is proposing revised standards that are racist and factually incorrect,” James J. Fedderman, president of the Virginia Education Association, the state’s largest teachers’ union, told Yahoo News. “This attack on these standards continues to be a divisive approach to put parents against teachers and to put teachers against parents.”
Last week’s draft, which has since been slightly revised, removed mention of Martin Luther King Jr. Day from the K-5 standards and made no mention of Juneteenth. Both have since been restored to the draft.
Students line up to enter their classrooms for kindergarten orientation at Lyles-Crouch Traditional Academy in Alexandria, Va., on Aug. 19. (Craig Hudson for the Washington Post via Getty Images)
Charles Pyle, a spokesman for the Virginia Department of Education, said the omissions were unintentional.
“The August draft included the broad standards and much more granular curriculum frameworks for each grade level and course,” Pyle told Yahoo News in an email. “Much of the recent public comment has centered on content that is still in the draft curriculum frameworks.”
The latest draft put forth by the Virginia DOE contains a bevy of changes from a draft it released in July, written largely by the Democratic administration of then-Gov. Ralph Northam. The Northam administration’s draft standard attempted to include a full breadth of history that included eras in which racism and slavery were widely accepted and antisemitism and homophobia were rampant in American society. Youngkin’s proposed rewrite seeks to downplay the role of bigotry in U.S. history.
Words like “Nazis” and “Final Solution,” which are essential to understanding the Holocaust, are omitted in the latest version. Inaccuracies include a statement saying that Virginia’s capital was relocated from Jamestown to Williamsburg during the Revolutionary War, when it was in fact relocated to Richmond.
An aerial view of Jamestown, Va., from a 17th century painting. (Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
The draft also states that the last U.S. president from Virginia was Zachary Taylor, who was elected in 1848, not Woodrow Wilson, elected in 1912. Wilson was born and raised in Virginia, though he served as governor of New Jersey before becoming U.S. president.
In August, the Virginia Board of Education was originally scheduled to vote on the recommended guidelines, which would have been the standards put together by the Northam administration. The decision was delayed after state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jillian Balow urged the board to give Youngkin’s five newly appointed board members additional time to review the documents.
Under Virginia law, history standards are required to be updated every seven years; the last time they were updated was 2015. They set Virginia’s expectations for student learning in history and social sciences statewide, which are eventually assessed through various tests.
The sweeping changes in this latest draft come less than 60 days after the department announced that it did not anticipate “any major changes or deletions of content” to a previous draft under Northam.
The original document under Northam was developed over nearly two years of consultation with a team of historians, professors, parents, students and museums, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Fedderman said the original version went through more than 400 experts, who devoted thousands of hours of their time on the standards, and he lamented that their work is now being “discredited” and “thrown out.”
“Gov. Youngkin continues to say, ‘We want to hear from parents.’ Well, there are educators who are parents,” Fedderman said, adding that he did not know why there had been no collaboration with his union.
Youngkin, then Virginia’s Republican gubernatorial nominee, addresses a rally in Henrico, Va., on Oct. 23, 2021. (Zach Gibson/Getty Images)
“There’s never been a decision that has been made that impacted children and public education, the teaching profession, without the Virginia Education Association being consulted,” he said. “Whether they took our advice or not, we were always consulted, there was always a discussion.”
The process that was followed for the latest document proposed by the Youngkin administration is unclear. The DOE did not provide answers to a direct question on the process posed by Yahoo News.
But Balow, the state superintendent, has publicly acknowledged seeking consultation with the Thomas Fordham Institute, a conservative education policy think tank, and Michigan’s Hillsdale College, which played an instrumental role in the drafting of the “1776 Report” on U.S. history commissioned by then-President Donald Trump. That report sought to promote a “patriotic education” about race and the birth of the nation, a direct counter to the New York Times’s “1619 Project,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning report on the major role of slavery in the founding of the United States. The “1776 Report” was widely condemned by groups like the American Historical Association for being “written hastily in one month after two desultory and tendentious ‘hearings’” and “without any consultation with professional historians of the United States.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones’s book, “The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story,” displayed in a bookstore in 2021. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
The new document also does not once mention the word “racism,” which James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, described as “a problem.”
“You can argue that the central concepts in American history are freedom or liberty or democracy, but you cannot teach American history without helping students to understand that racism has been a central theme,” Grossman told the Times-Dispatch. “You just can’t.”
Gail Flax, a retired Virginia educator, told the Virginia Mercury that learning accurate history is the best way to understand the world around us.
“You have to know what happened before and what happened afterward to be able to analyze and contextualize history,” she said.
In all, the revision was more than 300 pages shorter than its predecessor, mainly because it excluded a curriculum framework, a more detailed document that the Board of Education approves a year before its implementation.
Kindergarten teacher Lindsey Lienau does a headcount of her students at Lyles-Crouch Traditional Academy on Aug. 19. (Craig Hudson for the Washington Post via Getty Images)
Cassandra Newby-Alexander, an endowed professor of Virginia Black history and culture at Norfolk State University, told VPM, a Richmond-based NPR affiliate, that she is “disturbed and troubled” by the new draft.
“This is not an update. … This is an entirely different document,” she said. “I have never seen such a messy, incoherent and inaccurate document that is age-inappropriate for the content that is being taught.”
Fedderman objected that any revisions to date have not shown any “significant improvement.”
“I believe that this is another attempt to show that Virginia Public Schools are failing our students, because if they push these standards through in the middle of the year, and students are assessed on all of these new standards without preparation, it’s going to show that they don’t have the skill set to be successful,” he said. “And that’s not the case. It’s just that this administration continues to move the goalposts every day.”
Cover thumbnail photo: Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Teen’s eulogy to ‘racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, Trump-loving’ father at his funeral goes viral
Michelle De Pacina – November 17, 2022
A 19-year-old TikTok user has gone viral after sharing a video of their eulogy to their deceased father at his funeral, in which they call him a “racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, Trump-loving” man.
The user, identified as Saga, goes by the handle @saginthesunforever and has self-described themselves as a “Black supremacist” on their TikTok bio. Saga, who uses the pronouns they/them, has received widespread backlash after their viral video was re-posted to Twitter by controversial conservative account Libs of TIkTok on Tuesday.
In the video, Saga can be seen on stage delivering their eulogy speech to their father at his funeral.
“Dad, please know that while I am grateful and highly aware of all that you’ve given this family, I still don’t miss you,” Saga says. “When you died, I felt like there was a hole. I missed something, but it wasn’t you. It was the idea of what you could [have] become. I missed being able to hope and wish that one day you’d turn a corner and see the world from my perspective. I missed the idea that one day you might help me fight for the things that matter. I miss my fantasy of you.”
“Because when you died, it solidified the fact that you’ll never be what you could have been, but only what you are,” they add. “And what you are is a racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, Trump-loving, cis, straight white man. That is all you will ever be to me.”
To conclude their eulogy, Saga says, “You are everything I aspire not to be…I swear to god, I will make this world a better place. Not at all because of you, but in exact opposition to you.”
Although many viewers have praised Saga for their bravery, others condemned their “disrespectful” action at the funeral of their own father.
“What a dark, wicked heart this young lady has. I’m sure there were many there that loved this man and are grieving. Even if she hated her father, she had zero concern for the pain she caused those that were mourning his loss,” one user tweeted.
“He doesn’t have to deal with her relentless hatred anymore. He’s gone and she’ll still be perpetually outraged. She really made someone else’s funeral about her. Could have skipped it, but how would she get 15 minutes of internet attention then? She’s toxic,” another user wrote.
However, the 19-year-old reportedly defended their speech to The National Desk (TND), noting that they wanted to “stand firm in their truth and speak it no matter what dissenting opinions would say.”
“Funerals and speeches are to provide solace to the people giving them,” Saga told TND. “My solace was in my truth. It was in expressing and condemning all of the trauma my father has caused me and expressing my grief the way I needed to express it.”
“Some people think the funeral wasn’t the right place but what was the right place? When EVER would I get another opportunity to speak my truth and not just on TikTok to a screen but REALLY speak it,” Saga added. “A part of me wanted to prove to myself that I had the bravery and the balls to be able to stand in my truth and belt it out to whoever could hear which is why I did it.”
Former U.S. President Donald Trump has infamously been known to spread anti-China rhetoric through his repeated use of terms like “Chinese virus,” “Wuhan virus” and “Kung Flu” amid the COVID-19 pandemic. His use of racist terms have been blamed for fueling anti-Asian hate in America amid the global pandemic.
Last year, Trump was sued by the Chinese American Civil Rights Coalition (CACRC) for defamation and infliction of emotional distress. The organization claimed that Trump’s rhetoric has contributed to the rise of violence against Chinese and other Asian Americans.
Last week, Trump took a swing at Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, saying that his last name was Chinese-sounding, once again deploying the “Chinese” descriptive in a negative way. The incident was described by Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan as “racist” and “Asian hate against a white governor.”
“It was definitely distasteful and inappropriate, not only because I don’t think my friend Glenn Youngkin deserved to be attacked like that, but it was also — I mean, it’s Asian hate against a white governor, and making fun of Asians,” Hogan said.
“He didn’t even have his nationalities, right, because Young Kin would be Korean, as opposed to Chinese,” Hogan added. “But it’s just more of the same from Donald Trump, insults and attacks. And that’s one of the reasons why the party is in such bad shape.”
Lake had been hanging by a thread, but her chances of pulling off a victory against Democrat Katie Hobbs seem more like an illusion than a realistic possibility, given the number of remaining votes in key Maricopa County.
As of Monday night, she was losing by 20,481 votes – just under 1 percentage point. If the final margin is a half a percentage point or less, there would be an automatic recount. That would mean dragging out this whole drama for weeks.
But the voters who turned on Lake must pat themselves on the back. These voters are the defenders of democracy, who successfully built a wall to hold off the MAGA restrictionists’ scheme.
None of Lake’s or other MAGA claims are sticking
Kari Lake gives a press conference on the sidewalk outside of the Downtown Phoenix Post Office after casting her ballot on Nov. 8, 2022.
For days now, we’ve seen and heard voters’ powerful message. None of the MAGA candidates’ tantrums are sticking, and that’s a great thing.
On Election Day, they huffed and puffed over a computer glitch that affected some vote-counting machines. They screamed voter fraud.
That was a serious glitch, but it didn’t keep voters from casting their ballots. And so, it didn’t stick with Arizonans who are tired of hearing conspiracy theories and the lies of a stolen election.
Lake and other MAGA candidates later accused Maricopa County election officials of purposefully “dragging their feet” in counting votes – conveniently forgetting those overseeing the vote count are mostly Republicans merely following state law set by a Republican-controlled government.
That didn’t stick, either.
Cue Donald Trump. The former president was fuming to see that his hand-picked candidates, including Lake, were losing. Predictably, he fired off accusations of a stolen election.
That didn’t stick, either.
Their reaction is reassurance: You voted wisely
Over the weekend, some of Lake’s supporters called for military intervention because she’s losing.
“We the people are requesting the military to step in and redo our election,” a protester outside the Maricopa County ballot counting center said.
I kid you not. Lake’s supporters want the U.S. military to take over elections and presumably make sure she wins.
Don’t dismay, though. That call isn’t sticking, either.
If anything, those few protesters calling for military intervention make Lake look like a dictator wanna be – reassuring the Arizona voters who rejected her of their decision.
The slow vote count was exasperating, but that also gave us – the people – a real sense of normalcy.
There was actual excitement and gasps with every vote count revealed. That’s because we, the people, were hungry for mutual respect at the ballot box.
Elvia Díaz is the editorial page editor for The Republic and azcentral.
Far-Right Republican Who Called For ‘More Gallows’ Wonders If GOP Had A Messaging Problem
Matt Shuham – November 15, 2022
Far-Right Republican Who Called For ‘More Gallows’ Wonders If GOP Had A Messaging Problem
As updated vote tallies began to cement a loss for Trump-backed Arizona governor candidate Kari Lake on Monday, a far-right state lawmaker who told a gathering of white nationalists that “we need to build more gallows” started to have second thoughts about her party’s pitch to voters.
“We wonder now if we were in an echo chamber,” said state Sen. Wendy Rogers (R), who has also suggested throwing county officials in solitary confinement and spent years lying about the 2020 election.
“I don’t know, I’m just beginning to get some perspective,” added Rogers.
Rogers’ realization about echo chambers occurred in an interesting place: She was speaking to Charlie Kirk on his YouTube show, which is also broadcast on the Salem Radio Network.
Kirk is the founder of the right-wing youth group Turning Point USA, which has close ties to the Trump family and spent considerable time and money working to elect Arizona Republicans. The group’s nationwide endorsement page is now sprinkled with painful losses, including Lake and U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters (R).
“Every pollster was wrong, every single one,” Kirk told Rogers. Later, he apologized to listeners for getting the projections wrong ― referring to positive polling for Lake as “Kool-Aid” ― and mentioned that he’d heard “they didn’t run an internal poll the whole campaign.”
“Never again are we going to trust polls, or tracking, or any of that stuff,” Kirk said.
As the results rolled in, the crew speculated that Lake, who in many ways emulated former President Donald Trump’s election denialism and theatrical antagonism of the press, was simply too much for some otherwise winnable Arizona voters.
“If every person who voted to retire [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi in Arizona voted for Kari Lake, she’s governor,” Kirk said, referring to Arizona’s U.S. House delegation, which went from 5-4 Democratic to 6-3 Republican with this election.
“What that means … is a Republican undervote, and it looks like that happened,” he added, referring to voters who supported Republicans other than Lake.
Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers (R) has spent years making false claims about the 2020 election.
Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers (R) has spent years making false claims about the 2020 election.
Tyler Bowyer, TPUSA’s chief operating officer and a falsepresidential “elector” for Trump’s 2020 campaign, said “the same Trump attack messaging seemed to work” against Lake.
“I love Trump, I love him to death, but the Trump rally is an echo chamber,” Bowyer said separately, responding to Rogers’ comment. He recalled warning Lake’s political team against having “all the same people showing up to the same events” and not bringing in new supporters but rather “fangirls and fanboys.”
Rogers agreed that Trump’s more recent rallies felt like a “family reunion.”
“I do think voters are telling us that they’re fatigued,” Kirk said. “I think people are telling us, they’re trying to send it in more ways than one: ‘I’m going to vote for the more boring person.’”
A few minutes later, Kirk read the latest returns from Maricopa County ― home to more than half of Arizona’s residents ― which sealed the deal on Hobbs’ projected victory.
Then he read an email from a listener as he and his guests’ heads sank. “We all have Trump fatigue syndrome,” he read. “I reluctantly voted for Kari Lake but all my friends couldn’t do it. We don’t want all the bombast.”
When Kirk announced that Lake was trailing Hobbs by 20 points in Pima County, the second largest county in the state, Rogers did a double take. “You said 20 points?” she confirmed, seemingly stunned as she looked at her phone.
The MAGA energy that swept Kari Lake to victory in her primary has become hemlock in general elections.
Lake joins the list of hapless MAGA candidates who lost the governor’s offices in Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York and now Arizona.
Donald Trump recently boasted he created the modern Republican brand. Well, today the modern Republican brand is what, Edsel? Polaroid? Enron?
Nope.
It’s Old Hat.
Many of us dismissed Katie Hobbs
The temptation will be great to say Hobbs didn’t win the governor’s seat. Kari Lake lost it. Had Lake run as a normal Republican with her polished delivery and anchorwoman looks she’d be recarpeting the hallways right now on the Ninth Floor.
But let’s give Hobbs her due. This was a candidate widely underestimated by not only the Republicans but the media and even her own party, the Democrats.
Soft-spoken and understated, she was dismissed from the beginning as a lightweight and novice filled with self-doubt and struggling to find the right words in front of TV cameras. She stuck with her much-maligned strategy (that also took criticism from this corner) to skip debates in the primary and general elections.
What we didn’t know was that Hobbs had a brought a sledgehammer of her own to this race. She used it to smash conventional wisdom.
But Democrats have real reason to celebrate
Now that Hobbs has won the all-important Arizona governor’s race, Democrats are aglow. They should be.
To call what happened in Arizona and nationally a “red ripple” suggests the Republicans eked out a victory that could have been much larger. But this was not a Republican win. It was an indisputable and historic triumph for the Democratic Party and its candidates.
In a year when inflation was pushing up the price of milk and eggs, when the Democratic president was drowning in dismal approval ratings, when border crossings were at record highs and urban crime was beginning to scare people, the liberal party defied predictions and proved it is more in tune with the American people than its rival.
Democrats retained control of the Senate, and lost the House by such a fine margin, Republicans will be dancing with the devil trying to manage it.
Beneath the angst, Katie Hobbs has steel
Gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs speaks as the Arizona Democratic Party hosts a Unity Rally with statewide candidates to energize Democratic voters and volunteers ahead of the November election at Carpenters Union Hall on Saturday, Aug. 27, 2022.
In Arizona, Democrats could not wait to start their well-earned gloating. Lobbyist and former state lawmaker Chris Herstam got the jump on it Sunday night by picking a Twitter fight with me:
“@boas_phil’s so-called “leftists” have done quite well in the midterm (in Arizona & DC). Arizona Democrats will do even better in ‘24 with a presidential election turnout & a reproductive freedom initiative on the ballot.”
I bring this up to illustrate just what a long haul this has been for Hobbs and to show that beneath all the surface angst and insecurity, Katie Hobbs has some steel.
Herstam’s tweet reminded me that from the very beginning Hobbs had to endure attacks from a large part of the Democratic establishment.
When she got into the race, Herstam tried to bury her campaign.
He pointed loudly to a recent jury verdict that found that Democratic legislative leadership had discriminated against Senate aide Talonya Adams when they fired her in 2015.
Hobbs faced a torrent of criticism
Hobbs was Senate Democratic leader at the time, so she faced a storm of criticism.
“I think she’s in real trouble,” Herstam told KJZZ radio. “Katie Hobbs needs to apologize profusely and compassionately, and she hasn’t really done that yet.
“Frankly, she should have apologized very directly when she announced her candidacy. … And she didn’t do so. … That was a bonehead political move by her team.”
Herstam at the time was plumping the potential candidacy of U.S. Rep. Greg Stanton, the former Phoenix mayor who had not yet decided to skip the gubernatorial race.
“The anti-Hobbs storm, it’s still to come,” said Herstam, predicting the Republicans would run ads on the discrimination verdict. “They will be a real blow to her candidacy, as well as the entire Democratic ticket.”
Republicans ran with the ‘bigot’ theme
Herstam was prescient in one sense. The Republicans did pick up the “Hobbs is a bigot” theme. They got the idea from Democrats.
No. Hobbs was never convicted. Never charged. This was a civil case, not criminal. Chainsaws are poor instruments for making such distinctions.
Still, it’s worth remembering that before Republicans got to Hobbs many Democrats were on a tear.
Even Democrats criticized her in the primary
Five high-profile leaders of the Phoenix African American community put out this statement: “We ask that all persons, especially people of color, reconsider any support for Katie Hobbs to become the next governor of Arizona.”
Understand that this was during the social upheaval sparked by the police killing of George Floyd. Feelings were raw. And a number of Democrats were working hard to destroy her campaign.
Warren Stewart, once a centrist Democrat who morphed into a sharper-edged social-justice hawk, said he was done with Hobbs.
Now that Hobbs has won the main prize in Arizona’s 2022 election, many will forget the onslaught she survived just to get her party’s nomination.
They’ll forget she showed up for the fight as other big-name Democrats demurred. That she fought through all the insults from her own party before Kari Lake fired her artillery.
It’s one thing to bring Kari Lake-level confidence to an election, throwing flames and spitting nails. It’s another to wrestle down your self-doubt every day before you armor up to compete.
Hobbs could not match the smooth delivery of Kari Lake and always seemed self-conscious of it.
She looked like she was fighting through private doubts that may have been her most formidable opponent. And yet she stayed with it. No one was going to push her out.
That takes guts.
And we would all do well never to underestimate her again.
Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic.
Why a Trump-appointed Texas judge blocked Biden’s student-debt cancellation plan
Ayelet Sheffey – November 14, 2022
A view of the US Capitol before a news conference to discuss student-debt cancellation on September 29, 2022.Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Trump-appointed Judge Mark Pittman struck down Biden’s debt relief in Texas last week.
He argued the two student-loan borrowers who sued have sufficient standing to block the plan.
But some legal experts and Democrats said Pittman should never have taken up the case in the first place.
A federal judge doesn’t think President Joe Biden’s plan to cancel student debt for millions of borrowers is legal.
On Thursday evening, Mark Pittman — a Texas judge appointed by former President Donald Trump — struck down Biden’s plan to forgive up to $20,000 in student-loans for federal borrowers making under $125,000 a year. He ruled in favor of two student-loan borrowers who filed the lawsuit because each of them didn’t qualify for the full amount of relief, and at this point, Pittman’s ruing bars the Education Department from discharging student loans until a final verdict is made.
The Texas case, along with a number of other lawsuits backed by conservative groups, challenges Biden’s authority to use the HEROES Act of 2003, which gives the Education Secretary the ability to waive or modify student-loan balances in connection with a national emergency, like COVID-19. They claimed that enacting broad student-loan forgiveness is an overreach of the authority and should require Congressional approval, while Biden has maintained one-time student-loan forgiveness is well within the administration’s legal authority.
Pittman appeared sympathetic to the conservatives’ arguments in his ruling. “This case involves the question of whether Congress—through the HEROES Act—gave the Secretary authority to implement a Program that provides debt forgiveness to millions of student-loan borrowers, totaling over $400 billion,” Pittman wrote in his ruling. “Whether the Program constitutes good public policy is not the role of this Court to determine. Still, no one can plausibly deny that it is either one of the largest delegations of legislative power to the executive branch, or one of the largest exercises of legislative power without congressional authority in the history of the United States.”
The other lawsuits are also moving through the courts. The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, for example, ruled on Monday that its temporary pause on student-debt relief will remain in place until further orders from the court on a separate lawsuit in which six Republican-led states sued the loan forgiveness, arguing it would hurt their states’ tax revenues.
One of the key parts of Pittman’s ruling is that the plaintiffs actually met the legal requirements for a valid lawsuit. He ruled that they have standing to sue the administration, but several prominent Democrats and legal experts have questioned that decision — and other courts have thrown out similar conservative lawsuits due to a lack of standing.
The plaintiffs’ standing to sue
Both of the plaintiffs who brought the Texas lawsuit hold student loans. The first plaintiff, Myra Brown, sued because her loans are commercially-held and therefore ineligible for Biden’s debt relief, which requires the borrower to owe their debt directly to the federal government. And the other plaintiff, Alexander Taylor, sued because he was eligible only for $10,000 in debt forgiveness and not the full $20,000 since he did not receive a Pell Grant in college.
They both argued they were not given the opportunity to challenge the relief before its announcement since it didn’t go through the Administrative Procedure Act’s notice-and-comment period, and they said that failure to go through typical rulemaking processes, along with overstepping authority granted through the HEROES Act, were reasons why the debt relief should be blocked.
Pittman ruled that the plaintiffs have valid reasons for suing the administration. In his opinion, Pittman wrote that standing contains three legal requirements: there must be concrete injury, there must be causation, and there must be redressability, which is the likelihood the requested relief — in this case, blocking debt cancellation — would repair the injury caused. Pittman said that Biden’s Justice Department argument that the plaintiffs’ standing does not exist is “untrue.”
“Plaintiffs do not argue that they are injured because other people are receiving loan forgiveness,” Pittman wrote. “Their injury—no matter how many people are receiving loan forgiveness—is that they personally did not receive forgiveness and were denied a procedural right to comment on the Program’s eligibility requirements.”
And while Pittman concluded that debt relief did not violate procedural requirements, he said it violates authority under the HEROES Act because the “pandemic was declared a national emergency almost three years ago and declared weeks before the Program by the President as ‘over.’ Thus, it is unclear if COVID-19 is still a ‘national emergency’ under the Act.”
Some Democrats and legal experts take issue with the ruling
While Republican lawmakers were quick to laud Pittman’s decision, some legal experts weren’t sold on the merits of the ruling. Steve Vladeck, a CNN legal analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law, wrote in an opinion piece that “the biggest problem with Pittman’s ruling isn’t its substance; it’s why he allowed the case to be brought in the first place.”
Vladeck referenced prior conservative lawsuits seeking to challenge the debt relief that had been dismissed for lack of standing, and that if “the complaint is just that the government is acting unlawfully in a way that doesn’t affect plaintiffs personally, that’s a matter to be resolved through the political process – not a judicial one.”
And Leah Litman, a professor at the University of Michigan School of Law, wrote on Twitter that the ruling “is just the latest example of Trump-appointed district judges doing completely outlandish, lawless things to rule against policies by Democratic administrations,” referring to what she said was a lack of standing on the plaintiffs’ side.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren also slammed the ruling, telling NBC News on Sunday that “we have a court down in Texas, and if they’re going to play politics instead of actually following the law, they do put the program at risk.”
Democrat Katie Hobbs Defeats Trump-Backed Kari Lake in Arizona Governor’s Race
Charisma Madarang – November 14, 2022
Democratic Senate Candidate Mark Kelly Campaigns With Fellow Democrats In Phoenix – Credit: Getty Images
Democratic candidate Katie Hobbs, who has vigorously defended abortion rights during her campaign, has defeated Republican Kari Lake, the Associated Press reports. Lake joins the overwhelming list of MAGA wipeouts during the midterm elections.
Hobbs has defeated one of the most outspoken defenders of former President Donald Trump. Serving as Arizona’s Secretary of State, Hobbs has repeatedly rejected GOP lies about the election. Lake’s defeat follows the loss of two other high-profile election deniers — Republican Senate nominee Blake Masters and Secretary of State nominee Mark Finchem.
Hobbs, who will succeed Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, is the first Democrat to be elected governor in Arizona since Janet Napolitano in 2006.
Last month, Hobbs’ campaign headquarters were burglarized amid a heated race for the Senate. “Secretary Hobbs and her staff have faced hundreds of death threats and threats of violence over the course of this campaign. Throughout this race, we have been clear that the safety of our staff and of the secretary is our No. 1 priority,” said Nicole DeMont, the campaign manager for Hobbs, in a statement. “For nearly two years Kari Lake and her allies have been spreading dangerous misinformation and inciting threats against anyone they see fit.”
Once a Republican stronghold, Arizona was key to Trump and his supporters to casting doubt on Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory. Pre-election polls leading to the 2022 midterms indicated that the race was tied, but Hobbs’ victory was still a surprise to Democrats who feared her understated approach during the campaign would turn voters away. Hobbs exceeded expectations in Maricopa and Pima counties, where the majority of Arizona voters reside and where she made sure to spend a significant amount of her time campaigning in rural areas that traditionally vote Republican.
After Hobbs was declared the winner in the Arizona governor’s race, Congresswoman Liz Cheney reposted a letter from Lake mocking Cheney’s television ad targeting Arizona election deniers.
“Your recent television ad urging Arizonians not to vote for me is doing just the opposite,” wrote Lake. “Your commercial should add another 10 points to our lead! I guess that’s why they call the Cheney anti-endorsement the gift that keeps on giving.”
Yet while Cheney’s gratitude towards Lake is feigned, the votes in this race are very much real.
