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30 June 22
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Moore v. Harper is a grave threat to US democracy, and the fate of that democracy probably comes down to Amy Coney Barrett.
The case is perhaps the gravest threat to American democracy since the January 6 attack. It seeks to reinstate gerrymandered congressional maps that were struck down by North Carolina’s highest court because they “subordinated traditional neutral redistricting criteria in favor of extreme partisan advantage” for the Republican Party.
The plaintiffs argue that the state supreme court didn’t have the authority to strike down these maps, and rest their claim on legal arguments that would fundamentally alter how congressional and presidential elections are conducted.
Moore involves the “independent state legislature doctrine,” a theory that the Supreme Court has rejected many times over the course of more than a century — but that started to gain steam after Republican appointees gained a supermajority on the Supreme Court at the end of the Trump administration.
Under the strongest form of this doctrine, all state constitutional provisions that constrain state lawmakers’ ability to skew federal elections would cease to function. State courts would lose their power to strike down anti-democratic state laws, such as a gerrymander that violates the state constitution or a law that tosses out ballots for arbitrary reasons. And state governors, who ordinarily have the power to veto new state election laws, would lose that power.
As Justice Neil Gorsuch described this approach in a 2020 concurring opinion in a case concerning the deadline for casting mail-in ballots in Wisconsin, “the Constitution provides that state legislatures — not federal judges, not state judges, not state governors, not other state officials — bear primary responsibility for setting election rules.”
Four justices — Gorsuch, plus Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh — have all endorsed some version of this independent state legislature doctrine. Meanwhile, four other justices, the three liberal justices plus Chief Justice John Roberts, have signaled that they will not overrule the Court’s many precedents rejecting this doctrine.
That most likely leaves the fate of American democracy in the hands of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee who typically votes with Republicans in election cases.
This said, it is unclear whether this Supreme Court would implement the most extreme version of this doctrine — with a rigid rule that a state supreme court can never strike down a state election law, or that a state governor can never veto an election bill — or a less extreme one.
Last March, the Moore case appeared on the Court’s “shadow docket.” Although a majority of the Court voted to temporarily turn the case away — with Kavanaugh explaining that he voted to do so because the case arrived at the Court at the wrong time — Alito wrote a dissenting opinion saying that he would have immediately reinstated North Carolina’s gerrymandered maps. His opinion also suggests that he wants to give himself and his fellow justices maximal flexibility to overrule state court decisions that he does not like.
So under Alito’s approach, pro-democracy state constitutional provisions might not cease to function altogether, they would only cease to function when Alito and four of his fellow Republican colleagues wish to suspend them.
Needless to say, the stakes in Moore are exceedingly high. The Court’s decision in Moore could potentially neutralize many states’ efforts to combat partisan gerrymandering. And in key swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — where Republicans control the state legislature and Democrats control either the governor’s mansion, the state supreme court, or both — Moore could give the Republican Party unlimited control over how federal elections are conducted.
The independent state legislature doctrine, briefly explained
The independent state legislature doctrine derives from a deceptively simple reading of the Constitution, which states that “the times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.” A separate provision says that presidential elections shall also be conducted in a way determined by the state “Legislature.”
One way to read these provisions — the way that Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh have suggested it should be read — is to say that only the body of representatives that is often described as a state’s “legislative branch” can set election rules. And that the executive branch (including the governor) and the judicial branch (including the state supreme court) may be cut out of this process entirely.
But the Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected this theory. The issue first arose in Davis v. Hildebrant (1916), which upheld a provision of the Ohio constitution permitting the people of the state to veto state election laws via a popular referendum.
Davis reasoned that the word “legislature,” as it is used by the relevant provisions of the Constitution, does not refer exclusively to the elected body of representatives who make up the state’s legislative branch. Instead, it refers more broadly to any individual or body that possesses some part of the power to make laws within a state — what the Court referred to as the “legislative power.”
Davis explained that, under Ohio’s constitution, “the referendum was treated as part of the legislative power,” and thus “should be held and treated to be the state legislative power for the purpose of creating congressional districts by law.”
This is the only reading of the relevant US constitutional provisions that makes sense because, as legal scholars (and brothers) Vikram David Amar and Akhil Reed Amar explain in a recent paper, “state people and state constitutions are masters of state legislatures,” and not the other way around.
That is, each state has the power to define, through its constitution, which body or group of bodies possesses the “legislative power” — the power to make laws. A state constitution can assign that power entirely to a body of elected representatives, but it can also give part of that power to the state governor, the state courts, to a redistricting commission, or to the people themselves through ballot initiatives and referendums.
Indeed, this is exactly how most state governments work. State constitutions — like the federal Constitution — typically permit the state’s chief executive to veto election laws. And they typically give state courts the power to resolve conflicts about how to interpret the state constitution and existing state election laws.
As the Amars write, “since the Revolution, every state legislature has been defined and circumscribed, both procedurally (e.g., What counts as a quorum? Is the governor involved in legislation?) and substantively (e.g., What rights must the legislature respect?) by its state constitution.”
The Court’s holding in Davis has been upheld many times since that decision was handed down. Most recently, in Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission (2015), the Court upheld Arizona’s decision to use a bipartisan commission to draw congressional maps. In that case, the Court explained that “our precedent teaches that redistricting is a legislative function, to be performed in accordance with the State’s prescriptions for lawmaking, which may include the referendum and the Governor’s veto.”
The Court’s decision to hear the Moore case is very odd
Since four justices have already called for cases like Davis and Arizona State Legislature to be overruled or significantly altered, it’s not surprising that the Court decided to hear a case that could potentially do so — under the Supreme Court’s rules, four votes are needed to place a case on the Court’s docket of cases that receive full briefing and oral argument.
But it is surprising that the Court thought Moore was an appropriate vehicle to hear an independent state legislature doctrine case. That’s because, even if you accept Gorsuch’s theory that the state legislature and not the state judiciary bears “primary responsibility for setting election rules,” the North Carolina legislature explicitly authorized its state’s courts to hear gerrymandering lawsuits.
In other words, even if the independent state legislature doctrine is valid, North Carolina’s courts are still allowed to decide gerrymandering cases because the state legislature told them to do so.
North Carolina law provides that lawsuits challenging “any act of the General Assembly that apportions or redistricts State legislative or congressional districts” may be filed “in the Superior Court of Wake County and shall be heard and determined by a three‑judge panel.” This court’s decision may then be appealed to the state supreme court.
Indeed, North Carolina’s laws — again, laws that were written by the state legislature — provide detailed instructions on how state courts should behave when they determine that a legislative map is illegal. One statute requires state courts to “find with specificity all facts supporting” its conclusion that a map is illegal. Another provides that, after a state court strikes down a redistricting plan, it may not “impose its own substitute plan unless the court first gives the General Assembly a period of time to remedy any defects identified by the court.”
In its eagerness to hear an independent state legislature doctrine case, in other words, the Supreme Court appears to have taken up a case where there is no legitimate legal conflict. Even if state legislatures have exclusive authority to shape a state’s election law, the North Carolina state legislature used this authority to explicitly empower state courts to strike down gerrymandered maps.
And yet, it’s hard to imagine why the Court would agree to hear this case unless it is at least considering rolling back decisions like Davis and Arizona State Legislature.
Sen. Joe Manchin, D-WV, walks through the U.S. Capitol on June 14, 2022, in Washington, D.C. (photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty)
Dozens of Democratic insurgents flipped the script on the old guard of the state party.
Now, after a six-year organizing push, every old guard party apparatchik — save for the treasurer — is out of office, replaced with activists from across the Democratic spectrum set on revitalizing the state and forcing renewed support from the national party. The June 18 victories mark the beginning of the end for an era defined by atrophy, nose-diving voter rolls, and just a single Democratic statewide representative: Manchin.
They did it by flipping the script on the Democratic Party. After Manchin and the Democratic National Committee used the bylaws governing unelected superdelegates to throw West Virginia’s 2016 presidential primary for Hillary Clinton — despite the fact that Sen. Bernie Sanders won every county in the state — activists used the DNC’s own rules to unseat the base of one of its most powerful members. They sowed the seeds of power by demanding that the party make good on its rules governing gender and racial equity in its staffing as well as those governing free, fair, and timely leadership elections.
Republicans now hold the governor’s office, supermajorities in both houses of the West Virginia Legislature, and every statewide office save for Manchin’s. That’s thanks largely to the inaction of a state party that until recently was composed entirely of Manchin loyalists. There was outgoing state party Chair Belinda Biafore, who survived an attempted ousting over her handling of state party diversity, and former Manchin chief of staff Larry Puccio, who notoriously switched political parties after his departure. The recent upset offers hope that by populating the lower offices with Democrats who are committed to serving the public instead of favor-trading for personal gain, Manchin will no longer be the party’s only candidate who can run statewide and win.
The lack of Democratic support for one of the most impoverished and isolated regions of Appalachia culminated in a Republican takeover that started in the early 2000s and reached its peak with Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential victory. In the general election against Clinton, Trump emerged with nearly 70 percent of the Mountain State vote.
While Democrats treated West Virginia as a lost cause, the state and its party apparatus fell into disrepair at the hands of Manchin, who blamed his party’s statewide failures on progressive trends in the national party rather than his own lack of incentive to help anyone but himself and his allies.
The new slate of West Virginia Democrats is made up of a broad coalition of activists — including moderates — seeking to disrupt Manchin’s power. Unlike the Democratic Party upset in Nevada, which saw the Democratic Socialists of America overthrow a calcified political machine with a vast progressive ground game, West Virginia’s insurgents pulled it off by outmaneuvering a decaying party leadership grown accustomed to uncontested elections — using the DNC’s own bylaws.
At the helm of the new executive committee is party Chair Mike Pushkin, a cab driver, musician, and member of the West Virginia House of Delegates. Pushkin is a cautious left-leaning liberal, one who tends to abstain from attacking Manchin head-on. Instead, he’s focused on rebuilding the party through the same bread-and-butter issues he pursued in the House of Delegates: job creation, addressing the opioid crisis, and allying with House libertarians to successfully pass a medical marijuana legalization bill.
In the vice chair position now sits Danielle Walker, a state delegate who appears to be the first person of color to sit on the executive committee in West Virginia history. Walker, an unabashed progressive, is the real triumph of the movement. After receiving Manchin’s endorsement for state delegate, she went on to blast the senator for his repeated attacks on Democratic priorities, like refusing to block the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and his failure to save the Mylan pharmaceutical plant in her district.
“We won every officer seat we ran for,” said Shane Assadzandi, one of the organizers behind the new slate. “And after years of having to fight our own party to get a seat at the table, I look forward to fighting Republicans at the ballot box instead of useless Democrats at committee meetings.”
Some organizers first found each other amid the populist energy that emerged from Sanders’s clean sweep of the state during the 2016 primary, while other, more moderate members of the push joined up to remake a party that didn’t seem set on forwarding any candidates, moderate or otherwise. By enlisting, they realized that they could have an actual voice in the political process instead of serving as just one more set of pawns.
For years prior to this month’s landslide victory, social worker-turned-organizer Selina Vickers battled the state party through the DNC’s adjudicative process, filing national challenges against the party’s violations of both state code and DNC bylaws. The dozen-odd members of party leadership are supposed to be elected by the 100-member executive committee, themselves elected by voters during midterm elections. But up until this year, that body served as a rubber stamp to approve the list of party leaders handed down by the incoming Democratic gubernatorial nominee.
“I started poring over all the rules that dictate this process and thinking about what was really going on here,” Vickers told The Intercept. “What I discovered was that they were electing the chair, the vice chair, and all their officers just months before the state convention in the presidential year without any real competition. … As soon as a new committee is elected during the midterms, it’s also supposed to elect its officers. Instead, they had developed a tactic of waiting to elect the slate dictated by the gubernatorial candidate to prevent grassroots groups from building power, and that’s what happened over and over and over again.”
Vickers began attending DNC meetings and taking notes on how power moved through the highest ranks of the Democratic Party. After years of going to meetings across multiple DNC committees, she submitted her research to the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee through what would eventually total nine challenges to the former regime’s operating procedures. These challenges included failure to hold timely elections, failure to announce committee meetings within the required time frame, failure to ensure committee diversity seats, and, critically, failure to make good on provisions stipulating requirements for gender parity in the overwhelmingly male state committee.
In the summer of 2020, the DNC sent Vickers a memorandum acquiescing to a number of the challenges, laying the groundwork for this month’s upset. Between changes to committee elections catalyzing competitive races and newly enforced mandates on gender parity and diversity, organizers were equipped with procedural weapons to take on intransigent leadership.
Gender parity increased competition for executive committee seats, and making good on diversity and youth requirements helped clean out the overwhelmingly homogenous and aging old guard.
In a sardonic twist of fate, the new slate of West Virginia Democrats used the very bylaw code long scorned by progressives for entrenching the DNC’s power over free elections against its creator.
“I don’t love political parties, so I view what we did here as democratic with a small ‘D,’” Vickers said. “For me, it’s about changing the party we have so that West Virginia has an actual chance. You get pissed when you see people living in poverty in coal camps, people breathing in silica, all of this stuff directly related to policymakers in Charleston. It doesn’t matter if you’re a progressive or a moderate or an independent, there’s a seat at the table if we can unrig the system.”
During the upcoming midterm elections, the new slate will focus on winning down-ballot races for offices like city council, county commission, state delegate, and eventually state Senate. Without a roster of candidates building trust, legitimacy, and fundraising networks at the local level, statewide offices remain out of reach. And while organizers will have to contend with Nick Casey, the singular Manchin holdover serving as party treasurer, he’ll be closely watched by the newly electeds dead set on change.
With the prospect of flipping West Virginia blue long off, the tactic of using DNC bylaws against old guard regimes may still prove replicable in other states like Massachusetts that are struggling under the weight of ineffective party leadership. As The Intercept reported in 2020, Massachusetts’s party executives engineered a homophobic smear campaign to spike the candidacy of Alex Morse, a young mayor from Holyoke who attempted to overthrow one of the most conservative Democrats in the House.
Despite the challenges facing West Virginia, Walker is optimistic about Democrats’ odds going forward. “I see Democrats around the state of West Virginia having hope for the first time,” she told The Intercept. “There’s a new beacon of light shining down on the government with people energized and ready to strategize with a return to the democratic process.”
“We are going to build livable jobs, safe jobs, sustainable jobs, sustainable housing, a public education system that will be respected, where educators, personnel, and students will all have a voice,” Walker said. “We don’t just want West Virginians to barely survive. We want them to thrive.”
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson poses for a portrait on Feb. 18, 2022. (photo: Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
At a noon ceremony at the Supreme Court, Jackson was joined by her husband and two children for the swearing in. A formal investiture will follow in fall.
Jackson took two oaths during the livestreamed event: a constitutional oath, administered by Chief Justice John Roberts, and a judicial oath, administered by Justice Stephen Breyer.
Biden nominated Jackson in February, fulfilling a campaign promise to nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court.
"It has taken 232 years and 115 prior appointments for a Black woman to be selected to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States, but we've made it! We've made it — all of us," Jackson said in remarks at a White House event the day after the Senate vote.
"I have dedicated my career to public service because I love this country and our Constitution and the rights that make us free," Jackson also said.
Jackson, 51, has been confirmed since April, when the Senate voted 53 to 47 on her nomination. It was expected she would replace 83-year-old Justice Breyer — whom she clerked for after she graduated from Harvard Law School in 1996 — when he stepped down. His retirement will be effective Thursday.
She faced contentious Senate confirmation hearings
All 50 Senate Democrats, including the two independents and three Republicans — Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — voted in favor of Jackson's confirmation. The vote was lauded as a "historic moment" by Democrats, though the confirmation process was filled with clashes between the parties over Jackson's past judicial decisions.
Jackson served eight years as a federal trial court judge and last June was confirmed for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia after also being nominated for that post by Biden.
Jackson is the first Supreme Court justice since Thurgood Marshall to have represented indigent criminal defendants as a public defender.
Monitors display Coinbase signage during the company's initial public offering in New York City on April 14, 2021. (photo: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg/Getty)
ICE is now able to track transactions made through nearly a dozen different digital currencies, including Bitcoin, Ether, and Tether.
In August 2021, Coinbase sold a single analytics software license to ICE for $29,000, followed by a software purchase potentially worth $1.36 million the next month, but details of exactly what capabilities would be offered to the agency’s controversial Homeland Security Investigations division of were unclear. A new contract document obtained by Jack Poulson, director of the watchdog group Tech Inquiry, and shared with The Intercept, shows ICE now has access to a variety of forensic features provided through Coinbase Tracer, the company’s intelligence-gathering tool (formerly known as Coinbase Analytics).
Coinbase Tracer allows clients, in both government and the private sector, to trace transactions through the blockchain, a distributed ledger of transactions integral to cryptocurrency use. While blockchain ledgers are typically public, the enormous volume of data stored therein can make following the money from spender to recipient beyond difficult, if not impossible, without the aid of software tools. Coinbase markets Tracer for use in both corporate compliance and law enforcement investigations, touting its ability to “investigate illicit activities including money laundering and terrorist financing” and “connect [cryptocurrency] addresses to real world entities.”
According to the document, released via a Freedom of Information Act request, ICE is now able to track transactions made through nearly a dozen different digital currencies, including Bitcoin, Ether, and Tether. Analytic features include “Multi-hop link Analysis for incoming and outgoing funds,” granting ICE insight into transfers of these currencies, as well as “Transaction demixing and shielded transaction analysis” aimed at thwarting methods some crypto users take to launder their funds or camouflage their transactions. The contract also provides, provocatively, “Historical geo tracking data,” though it’s unclear what exactly this data consists of or from where it’s sourced. An email released through the FOIA request shows that Coinbase didn’t require ICE to agree to an End User License Agreement, standard legalese that imposes limits on what a customer can do with software.
When asked about the ICE contract and the data involved, Coinbase spokesperson Natasha LaBranche directed The Intercept to a disclaimer on its website stating “Coinbase Tracer sources its information from public sources and does not make use of Coinbase user data.” LaBranche did not answer questions about how ICE is using Coinbase Tracer, nor if the company imposed any limits to that use.
Coinbase has in recent years made a concerted effort to pitch its intelligence features to government agencies, including the IRS, Secret Service, and Drug Enforcement Administration. Earlier this month, Coinbase vice president of global intelligence John Kothanek testified before a congressional panel that his company was eager to aid the cause of Homeland Security. “If you are a cyber criminal and you’re using crypto, you’re going to have a bad day. … We are going to track you down and we’re going to find that finance and we are going to hopefully help the government seize that crypto.” Coinbase’s government work has proved highly controversial to many crypto fans, owing perhaps both to the long-running libertarian streak in that community and the fact that these currencies are so frequently used to facilitate various forms of fraud.
The Coinbase Tracer tool itself was birthed in controversy. In 2019, Motherboard reported that Neutrino, a blockchain-analysis firm the company acquired in order to create Coinbase Tracer, “was founded by three former employees of Hacking Team, a controversial Italian surveillance vendor that was caught several times selling spyware to governments with dubious human rights records, such as Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan.” Following public outcry, Coinbase announced these staffers would “transition out” of the company.
Homeland Security Investigations, the division of ICE that purchased the Coinbase tool, is tasked not only with immigration-related matters, aiding migrant raids and deportation operations, but broader transnational crimes as well, including various forms of financial offenses. It’s unclear to what end ICE will be using Coinbase. The agency could not be immediately reached for comment.
Warren Buffett described CRYPTO as RAT POISON SQUARED. Too many people have spoken out against CRYPTO and there will surely be additional information coming out. This has massive negative economic potential.
Jerome Powell is a tRump appointee and an attorney. He is not an economist and presided over the biggest scandal in Federal Reserve history and took no action.
TED BUDD IS RUNNING FOR SENATE IN NORTH CAROLINA
HIS OPPONENT IS CHERI BEASLEY - MAYBE A BETTER CHOICE
These articles are from WALL STREET ON PARADE and you might consider subscribing to the newsletter:
As Bitcoin Crashes 34 Percent in a Week, U.S. Congressman Ted Budd Pushes Bank Regulator to Approve More Crypto National Bank Charters
https://wallstreetonparade.com/2021/05/as-bitcoin-crashes-34-percent-in-a-week-u-s-congressman-ted-budd-pushes-bank-regulator-to-approve-more-crypto-national-bank-charters/
It was also prior to economist Nouriel Roubini calling crypto a Ponzi scheme, echoing the same sentiment from former Labor Secretary Robert Reich in the Guardian newspaper. And it was prior to 26 scientists and software engineers, who have since been joined by hundreds of others, signing a letter to Congressional committee chairs that outlines why crypto and blockchain have been a sham from the very beginning.
https://wallstreetonparade.com/2022/06/has-crypto-endangered-federally-insured-big-banks-ask-state-street/
You can read the full letter here.
But this latest missive is far from the only siren call that has been sounded by experts. As far back as three years ago we reported this statement from NYU Professor and economist Nouriel Roubini:
“Crypto currencies are not even currencies. They’re a joke…The price of Bitcoin has fallen in a week by how much – 30 percent. It goes up 20 percent one day, collapses the next. It is not a means of payment, nobody, not even this blockchain conference, accepts Bitcoin for paying for conference fees cause you can do only five transactions per second with Bitcoin. With the Visa system you can do 25,000 transactions per second…Crypto’s nonsense. It’s a failure. Nobody’s using it for any transactions. It’s trading one shtcoin for another shtcoin. That’s the entire trading or currency in the space where’s there’s price manipulation, spoofing, wash trading, pump and dumping, frontrunning. It’s just a big criminal scam and nothing else.”
https://wallstreetonparade.com/2022/06/as-the-speeding-crypto-train-crashes-scientific-and-engineering-experts-tell-congress-that-both-crypto-and-blockchain-were-a-sham-from-the-beginning/
and derivatives:
Notional means face amount of derivatives. As of March 31, 2022, the four federally-insured commercial banks that held 89 percent of all derivatives in the banking system were as follows: JPMorgan Chase with $60.26 trillion; Goldman Sachs Bank USA with $49.75 trillion; Citibank (part of Citigroup) with $45.74 trillion; and Bank of America NA with $22.48 trillion.
https://wallstreetonparade.com/2022/06/jpmorgan-chases-derivatives-spike-by-14-trillion-in-first-quarter-to-six-year-high-of-60-trillion/
READ MORE
Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who was on Donald Trump's 2020 legal team, is at the forefront of efforts to place election deniers in key positions. (photo: Pablo Martínez Monsiváis/AP)
Training sessions in battleground states led by activists who claim the 2020 election was stolen aim to influence conduct of elections
At the forefront of this push is Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who was on Donald Trump’s legal team in 2020 and played a key role in his effort to overturn the election. Over the last few months, Mitchell has held “election integrity summits” in several battleground states, convening groups and citizens who continue to believe the 2020 election was stolen. The summits offer in-depth training on how to monitor election offices and how to work elections. At a mid-June summit in North Carolina, Mitchell mocked the term “election denier” and said “whether the outcome was correct, that’s all I deny”. Voter fraud is extremely rare and there was no evidence of widespread fraud in 2020.
The effort, called the Election Integrity Network, underscores how Trump and allies are capitalizing on now deeply seeded Republican doubt about Joe Biden’s victory and are targeting key election offices and jobs that play a considerable role in determining how ballots are cast and counted. The summits are a project of the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), a group with close ties to Trump’s political operation, and where Mitchell is a senior legal fellow. Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, is a senior partner at CPI.
Mitchell has described the effort as a way to take control of the apparatus of local elections, according to ABC News. CPI did not return a request for comment.
“Given that people who were part of the attempted coup are behind this, it’s certainly something that at a minimum we need to be vigilant about,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, who works closely with election officials across the country on election administration issues.
That recruitment is happening alongside a similar push from the Republican National Committee, which has already recruited 16 in-state election integrity directors, more than 15,000 poll workers and 10,000 poll observers in battleground states, said Gates McGavick, an RNC spokesman. Officials from the RNC have spoken at Mitchell’s summits. McGavick said the RNC “works with other groups who have an interest in promoting election integrity” but the party was “not part of a formal coalition with any outside groups”.
“Any individual participating in our election integrity program who does not follow the law will be promptly dismissed,” he said.
The effort is focused on getting people to sign up poll observers and challengers as well as election workers who help run voting precincts and count ballots. Parties and campaigns have long hired observers and challengers to monitor the polls, but election workers, temporary employees hired by local election offices, have largely been seen as non-partisan.
Republicans say that they are aiming to correct an imbalance in these election positions, especially in heavily Democratic cities and other areas.
Election officials say they welcome the surge in GOP interest, especially in areas where it can be hard to find Republican workers. Still, there are concerns that conspiracy-minded workers could abuse their positions to slow down the voting process and spread false or misleading information about what they see at the polls.
In 2020, observations from poll observers played a critical role in spreading information that Trump and allies would use to spread the false claim the election was stolen in states like Georgia, Arizona and Michigan. In Detroit, an observer said she saw ballots being delivered in the middle of the night and workers illegally awarding votes to Biden. In Phoenix, those who used Sharpie pens to fill out ballots had their votes rejected by machines, poll observers said. Even though those claims, based on misunderstandings of election rules, were debunked, many of them continue to live prominently among those who believe the election was stolen.
“You have those people who may have worked the precinct who intentionally don’t understand the procedures and that can then, with some level of authority, spread misinformation,” said Barb Byrum, the clerk in Ingham county, Michigan, a state where there is a big push to recruit GOP election workers.
“It is refreshing to see more people are interested in the process,” she added. “With that said, I understand that the Republican precinct worker applications as of recent have been prompted by election conspiracy groups.”
At the North Carolina summit in June, guests received a 20-page document that offered a detailed blueprint for forming statewide and local taskforces to monitor election officials. One section encourages citizens to research whether Republican officials in the state election office are “effective or silent partners”. Another section advises activists to figure out who in the state attorney general’s office is responsible for working with elections officials and whether that person is a “friend or foe”.
That kind of language is “absolutely outrageous”, Becker said. Election officials have faced an unprecedented wave of harassment since the 2020 election and many have quit their jobs.
“They’re citizens. They’re professionals. They’re our neighbors,” he said. “If we start to view our fellow citizens as our enemies, we’re lost.”
The guide also says to monitor voter registration drives and non-profits involved in election work with the goal of finding out “who are they really?”
Attendees were encouraged to sign up for the North Carolina Election Integrity Team (Nceit), a group working to implement many of the guide’s recommendations in each county. The group has been having regular weekly strategy calls.
The event featured speakers from a litany of conservative activist groups, including FreedomWorks, Tea Party Patriots, Citizens United and Heritage Action, according to an agenda obtained by the Guardian. Mac Warner, West Virginia’s Republican secretary of state, also attended the summit and gave a keynote address. Josh Findlay, the RNC’s national director of election integrity, spoke at the event.
Anyone could attend the event, which cost $20 to sign up for. A Guardian reporter who signed up as a guest was asked to leave the event after Mitchell’s opening remarks. “We don’t allow media to come to our summits, mainly because they’re never nice to us,” Mitchell said at the event. “They make fun of us.”
The Guardian obtained a recording of a panel on poll worker and observer training in which panelists acted out different scenarios that might arise at the precinct on polling day.
At one point during the panel, an audience member drew laughter when he asked “at what point do you call 911 and call a sheriff deputy to arrest the chief judge?”
Jim Womack, the Nceit chair, advised attendees to form relationships with local district attorneys. “The DA is going to be your person, the person you need to have a relationship with and be able to contact the local law enforcement to take action on something,” he said.
Gary Sims, the elections director in North Carolina’s Wake county, home of Raleigh, said his office had not yet seen a surge in people signing up to work the polls. He noted that state law outlines clear rules that people who work the polls must follow on election day and the consequences of breaking them.
“I’m very familiar with the groups that are staging this. Some of these individuals I’ve been dealing with for over a decade now. It’s just that, honestly, after the events and post-events of 2020, these groups have a charged-up base,” he said. “Before, they didn’t have an audience. Now they have an audience because of that. So they are capitalizing on that audience.”
Sims said he was frustrated to learn that a speaker at Mitchell’s summit had spread false information about Wake county’s processes for transporting ballots. “What they stated was, I want to say disinformation, not misinformation. Because it was not true,” he said. “It’s actually intentionally trying to villainize us.”
The planning underscores what many see as the biggest threat to future elections in the US. Having people who believe there is massive fraud in elections claim they witnessed such fraud could provide critical pretext officials could use to justify not-certifying a valid race. Trump and allies deployed a similar strategy in their effort to overturn the 2020 election.
Byrum, the Ingham county clerk, said that the city of Lansing, which usually receives just a handful of applications for Republican poll workers, had already received about 100 GOP applications. While she welcomed that interest, Byrum said disruptive election workers could slow down the process of voting on election day or cause a delay in counting mail-in votes, which could cause more people to doubt the election results.
Byrum has been encouraging local clerks to place first-time election workers who they are unfamiliar with – Democrat or Republican – in jobs where they will be responsible for passing out “I voted” stickers or have other limited interactions with voters at critical points in the voting process. When she begins training workers next month, she also said she plans to keep an eye out for people who might raise red flags.
“If they are prepared to act in bad faith, or slow down the process, or create any mischief or mayhem on election day, I will make sure they are held accountable in my county,” she said.
Who is funding this?
There seems to be another KOCH CONNECTION!
These election deniers are even raising questions in tRump areas - how bizarre is that?
Look at OTERO NEW MEXICO where they challenged a PRIMARY ELECTION.
The Glue that Connects Jeffrey Clark, John Eastman, Ginni Thomas, and the Guy Who Was Air-Dropped into the DOJ, Is Charles Koch’s Money
A warrant for the arrest of Carolyn Bryant Donham - identified as "Mrs. Roy Bryant" on the document - was discovered last week. (photo: AP)
A warrant for the arrest of Carolyn Bryant Donham — identified as "Mrs. Roy Bryant" on the document — was discovered last week by searchers inside a file folder that had been placed in a box, Leflore County Circuit Clerk Elmus Stockstill told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
Documents are kept inside boxes by decade, he said, but there was nothing else to indicate where the warrant, dated Aug. 29, 1955, might have been.
"They narrowed it down between the '50s and '60s and got lucky," said Stockstill, who certified the warrant as genuine.
The search group included members of the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation and two Till relatives: cousin Deborah Watts, head of the foundation; and her daughter, Teri Watts. Relatives want authorities to use the warrant to arrest Donham, who at the time of the slaying was married to one of two white men tried and acquitted just weeks after Till was abducted from a relative's home, killed and dumped into a river.
"Serve it and charge her," Teri Watts told the AP in an interview.
Keith Beauchamp, whose documentary film "The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till" preceded a renewed Justice Department probe that ended without charges in 2007, was also part of the search. He said there's enough new evidence to prosecute Donham.
Donham set off the case in August 1955 by accusing the 14-year-old Till of making improper advances at a family store in Money, Mississippi. A cousin of Till who was there has said Till whistled at the woman, an act that flew in the face of Mississippi's racist social codes of the era.
Evidence indicates a woman, possibly Donham, identified Till to the men who later killed him. The arrest warrant against Donham was publicized at the time, but the Leflore County sheriff told reporters he did not want to "bother" the woman since she had two young children to care for.
Now in her 80s and most recently living in North Carolina, Donham has not commented publicly on calls for her prosecution. But Teri Watts said the Till family believes the warrant accusing Donham of kidnapping amounts to new evidence.
"This is what the state of Mississippi needs to go ahead," she said.
District Attorney Dewayne Richardson, whose office would prosecute a case, declined comment on the warrant but cited a December report about the Till case from the Justice Department, which said no prosecution was possible.
Contacted by the AP on Wednesday, Leflore County Sheriff Ricky Banks said: "This is the first time I've known about a warrant."
Banks, who was 7 years old when Till was killed, said "nothing was said about a warrant" when a former district attorney investigated the case five or six years ago.
"I will see if I can get a copy of the warrant and get with the DA and get their opinion on it," Banks said. If the warrant can still be served, Banks said, he would have to talk to law enforcement officers in the state where Donham resides.
Arrest warrants can "go stale" due to the passage of time and changing circumstances, and one from 1955 almost certainly wouldn't pass muster before a court, even if a sheriff agreed to serve it, said Ronald J. Rychlak, a law professor at the University of Mississippi.
But combined with any new evidence, the original arrest warrant "absolutely" could be an important stepping stone toward establishing probable cause for a new prosecution, he said.
"If you went in front of a judge you could say, 'Once upon a time a judge determined there was probable cause, and much more information is available today,'" Rychlak said.
Till, who was from Chicago, was visiting relatives in Mississippi when he entered the store where Donham, then 21, was working on Aug. 24, 1955. A Till relative who was there, Wheeler Parker, told AP that Till whistled at the woman. Donham testified in court that Till also grabbed her and made a lewd comment.
Two nights later, Donham's then-husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, showed up armed at the rural Leflore County home of Till's great-uncle, Mose Wright, looking for the youth. Till's brutalized body, weighted down by a fan, was pulled from a river days later in another county. His mother's decision to open the casket so mourners in Chicago could see what had happened helped galvanize the building civil rights movement of the time.
Bryant and Milam were acquitted of murder but later admitted the killing in a magazine interview. While both men were named in the same warrant that accused Donham of kidnapping, authorities did not pursue the case following their acquittal.
Wright testified during the murder trial that a person with a voice "lighter" than a man's identified Till from inside a pickup truck and the abductors took him away. Other evidence in FBI files indicates that earlier that same night, Donham told her husband at least two other Black men were not the right person.
2004: The Murder of Emmett Till
In 2004, 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley reported on the 1955 murder of 14-year-old
In 2004, 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley reported on the 1955 murder of 14-year-old
Emmett Till.
The window for staving off the worst of climate change is wider than we thought, but still pretty narrow. (photo: Tatiana Grozetskaya/Shutterstock)
ALSO SEE: Here's What America Looked Like Before the EPA
The decision risks putting the U.S. further off track from President Biden’s goal of running the power grid on clean energy by 2035
The vote was 6 to 3, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. writing for the court’s conservatives.
“Capping carbon dioxide emissions at a level that will force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate electricity may be a sensible ‘solution to the crisis of the day,’ ” Roberts wrote, referring to a court precedent. “But it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme.”
Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the dissenters, countered: “The Court appoints itself — instead of Congress or the expert agency — the decisionmaker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening.”
The decision risks putting the United States even further off track from President Biden’s goal of running the U.S. power grid on clean energy by 2035 — and making the entire economy carbon-neutral by 2050.
With higher seas, fiercer wildfires and other consequences of climate change apparent, the world is already in unprecedented territory. Biden hoped to lead by example to convince other countries to cut emissions and help the world keep warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).
Now such diplomacy has become more difficult for Biden, especially as countries scramble for new sources of oil and gas after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Biden said the ruling “is another devastating decision that aims to take our country backwards. While this decision risks damaging our nation’s ability to keep our air clean and combat climate change, I will not relent in using my lawful authorities to protect public health and tackle the climate crisis.”
The president said he will “continue using lawful executive authority, including the EPA’s legally-upheld authorities,” work with cities and states to pass laws and “keep pushing for additional Congressional action, so that Americans can fully seize the economic opportunities, cost-saving benefits, and security of a clean energy future.”
The court was considering the powers granted by the Clean Air Act, which was written decades ago, before climate change was widely recognized as a worldwide crisis.
Environmentalists were alarmed by the court’s decision.
Richard Lazarus, a Harvard environmental law professor, said in a statement that by insisting that an agency “can promulgate an important and significant climate rule only by showing ‘clear congressional authorization’ at a time when the Court knows that Congress is effectively dysfunctional, the Court threatens to upend the national government’s ability to safeguard the public health and welfare at the very moment when the United States, and all nations, are facing our greatest environmental challenge of all: climate change.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) praised the ruling.
“The Court has undone illegal regulations issued by the EPA without any clear congressional authorization and confirmed that only the people’s representatives in Congress — not unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats — may write our nation’s laws,” McConnell said in a statement.
The United States is the world’s second-biggest annual emitter of greenhouse gases, and is responsible for a greater portion of historical emissions than any other nation.
West Virginia v. EPA is the latest battle pitting the coal industry and Republican-led states against a Democratic administration that proposes sweeping changes to the way the nation’s power sector produces electricity, the nation’s second-largest source of climate-warming pollution.
The Supreme Court in 2016 stopped the Obama administration’s plan to drastically reduce power plants’ carbon output. The plan never went into effect, but its emission-reduction goals were met ahead of schedule because of economic conditions that made coal-fired plants more expensive.
A more lenient plan was promulgated by the Trump administration, which said its reading of the law limited the EPA’s actions to regulating emissions at a specific site instead of across the system, a restriction that has come to be known as “inside the fence.”
But on the last day of the Trump administration, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said that was an intentional “misreading” of the law.
“The EPA has ample discretion in carrying out its mandate,” the decision concluded. “But it may not shirk its responsibility by imagining new limitations that the plain language of the statute does not clearly require.”
As a result, the Trump rules were struck, the Obama rules were not reinstated, and the Biden administration has yet to formulate its plan.
For that reason, the administration and environmentalists were stunned when the Supreme Court took the case. The Biden administration advised it to simply vacate the D.C. appeals court decision and wait to make a more intensive review of the EPA’s powers after new regulations were proposed.
The case deeply divided the business community. Mining companies and other firms in the coal sector urged the court to rein in the EPA, arguing coal is necessary for keeping electricity prices low and the grid reliable. Apple, Tesla and other major tech and retail firms investing in renewable energy, meanwhile, told the court that “stable, nationwide rules” are needed to avert climate disaster.
The consolidated cases are known as West Virginia v. EPA.
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