Former President Donald Trump (R) not only wants Presidential candidate debates, he wants them to occur much earlier than they have in prior campaign seasons.
The Trump campaign has asked the Commission on Presidential Debates to schedule the anticipated matchups between him and President Joe Biden earlier in the election cycle, signaling Trump’s willingness to work the panel on date and venue.
I agree, with a caveat.
The No Labels group has folded its tents and quit the political race for this year, for a few reasons I’ve written about before. It appears, though, that there’s more to this fiasco than understood heretofore [ellipses in the original, emphasis added].
Democratic strategist Karen Finney argued No Labels had presented a “dangerous” threat to Biden’s re-election chances that Democrats, including her, actively worked to undermine.
They were very dangerous because they had over $70 million to get on the ballot,” Finney recalled.
“And what they were promising…They were promising that they could win states like Texas. And again, it was totally illogical, but it was a very real threat that myself and others worked very hard to not just undermine, but to make sure that the people they were talking to understood, that their rhetoric just did not work, and their math did not work[.”]
The US Supreme Court ruled Monday that former President and current Republican Primary Presidential candidate Donald Trump will remain on all of the relevant election ballots, overruling the Colorado State Supreme Court directly and Maine’s Secretary of State by extension. The Court’s reasoning is important. From the ruling’s second paragraph:
Because the Constitution makes Congress, rather than the States, responsible for enforcing Section 3 [of the 14th Amendment] against federal officeholders and candidates, we reverse.
The Court expanded on this, quoting Chief Justice Samuel Chase in his 1869 Griffin’s Case ruling:
In the aftermath of the 2020 election confusions in Georgia (both general and runoff), that State passed its Election Integrity Act that, among other things, shortened Georgia’s early voting period from nine weeks to four, reduced the window for mail-in ballots, and moved the deadline for registering to vote to 29 days before an election.
The Sixth Dist. of the Afr. Methodist Episcopal Church, the Ga. State Conf. of the NAACP, and The Concerned Black Clergy of Metro. Atlanta Inc., joined by the Federal government’s DoJ, sued to strike the law as voter suppressing—the stricter voting period unfairly discriminates against Black voters, among other complaints.
The 8th Circuit has ruled that private parties cannot bring suit over voting rights discrimination under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act; only the US Attorney General can. The 8th Circuit stands alone among courts and against long-standing precedent here. It’s still correct on the matter.
The court’s decision, in summary, said the
Arkansas branch of the NAACP and another organization couldn’t challenge the district lines drawn for the Arkansas House of Representatives after the 2020 census.
Circuit Judge David Stras, for the majority:
And that includes ending racial gerrymandering.
On Friday a Fifth Circuit panel heard arguments in a Voting Rights Act lawsuit (Robinson v Ardoin) that seeks to force Louisiana to draw a second majority-minority Congressional district. The case was put on pause while the Justices considered a challenge to Alabama’s map. Now the plaintiffs are using the Court’s Alabama ruling (Allen v Milligan) to advance an extreme racial gerrymander.
Never mind the 14th Amendment’s injunction that nor shall any State…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Or the 15th Amendment’s Art I:
The citizens of California want to have a State referendum on taxes, specifically a vote on the Taxpayer Protection and Government Accountability Act, in November 2024. The Act would limit the State government’s ability to raise taxes on those good citizens.
Progressive-Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom has joined John Burton, ex-State Progressive-Democratic Party Chairman, in an emergency(!) petition to the State’s Supreme Court to get the initiative removed from that election. The measure if passed, Newsom and Burton worry, would gut the administrative state and shift the longstanding balance of powers in California back toward the State’s legislative branch.
Alabama’s legislature redrew its Federal House of Representative district lines, leaving the State with one black-majority district. The State’s courts objected and ordered the lines drawn, strongly encouraging a second black-majority district be created, since 27% of the State’s citizens are black. The State’s legislature sort of obliged, creating a second district with 40% of its voters being black.
A three-judge Federal panel (which The Wall Street Journal identified as a special three-judge district court) rejected the new districts. It’s on this point that I think the court got things badly wrong, and if the AP article is accurate, exposed the intrinsic racism in the way district lines are drawn.
Georgia thinks it can’t update its Dominion voting machines in time for a major election in 17 months because the task is so massive. The State’s government men and women are aware that
Dominion voting machines had significant vulnerabilities, which led the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to issue a public advisory last year based on the findings.
But it’s too hard to fix in the time available, they claim. This is a copout.
No Labels is looking hard at running their own President/Vice President ticket for the 2024 election. The Progressive-Democratic Party is in fury over the possibility, to the extent that its Arizona arm is going to court to try to stop No Labels from registering its candidates in that State.
It [the Arizona chapter of the Progressive-Democratic Party] filed a lawsuit in state court against No Labels alleging that the signatures we collected and the petition approved by Arizona’s secretary of state should be thrown out.
Party’s rationale—and they’re absolutely serious: