A federal appellate panel on Saturday rejected the Trump administration’s request to lift a lower court’s injunction blocking the U.S. Postal Service from enforcing President Donald Trump’s March executive order targeting mail-in ballots as part of Republicans’ broader attack on voting rights. A three-judge panel of the Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 against a motion…
Source
Maine Democrats on Saturday selected former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson to replace Graham Platner as the party’s U.S. Senate nominee. Jackson now has just three months to make his case that Mainers should pick him to represent them in Washington over five-term Republican Sen. Susan Collins.
The Democrats’ scramble echoes the 2024 presidential election, when Kamala Harris ran for president after President Joe Biden withdrew. In this case, Jackson is the one taking the reins toward the end of a tight high-stakes race after his predecessor imploded and dropped out. But considering the disastrous circumstances, the nomination of Jackson looks like a pretty decent outcome for Democrats. There’s reason for cautious optimism that he could prevail in his race, given his unique position as a progressive insider with something to offer voters looking for populist outsiders.
This may end up being the smoothest passing of the baton Democrats could have hoped for.
It all came together shockingly fast. Platner’s campaign collapsed after a sexual assault allegation, and Democrats had less than two weeks to figure out how to replace him on the ballot. And the outcome of the convention held on Saturday had, in fact, been determined by the quickly cobbled-together process leading up to it.
The week before the state convention, registered Democrats voted in county-level mini-conventions in which they selected delegates to send to the state convention. The process was rushed and ad hoc, and the participation in the state conventions was less than a tenth of the primary, but the results were clear: Jackson dominated, winning 478 of 500 delegates up for grabs. Saturday’s state convention was a mere formality.
This may
It’s been four years since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade, ending the federal constitutional right to abortion. In the immediate aftermath of the decision, national attention centered on implementation of state bans and a rapidly shifting legal landscape. But four years later, one of the most impactful developments has…
Source
For members of Congress, trackers — staffers from the opposing party that are paid to follow their every move both on and off Capitol Hill — are a part of life.
Typically, the interactions are tame. A tracker will follow them with a cellphone camera while often asking pointed questions, hoping to catch them in an inopportune moment. The lawmaker may put their phone to their ear. Sometimes they’ll engage in a brief back and forth or take issue with the questions the tracker is peppering them with.
On Thursday, though, a Republican incumbent congressman, who’s in a tight race for re-election, took a different tack.
In a video shared first with MS NOW, Rep. Zach Nunn, R-Iowa, got briefly physical with a Democratic staffer, appearing to swat at the tracker’s phone.
.vid__embed {
width: 100%;
position: relative;
clear: both;
box-sizing: border-box;
overflow: visible;
}
.vid__container video {
width: 100%;
height: auto;
position: relative;
}
.wp-element-caption {
width: 100% !important;
text-transform: none !important;
line-height: 1.2 important;
position: relative;
}
.credits {
font-style: italic;
}
Republican Congressional incumbent swats at Democratic tracker’s phone in new video. Obtained by MS NOW
In the video, the tracker approaches Nunn as he walks on Capitol Hill, asking him about rural hospital closures. Nunn is walking with a journalist, though he claims to be speaking with a constituent. Nunn then walks by.
When the Democratic tracker follows up, asking, “No response, sir?” Nunn turns around, approaches the tracker, claims again to be with a “constituent,” tells him to “protect their privacy” and hits at the tracker’s phone. Nunn then walks away.
In a statement to MS NOW, Nunn wrote, “This wasn’t my finest moment, I shouldn’t have responded this way,
The outcome of Michigan’s Senate race will have major implications for the balance of power in Washington, DC, and for the future of the Democratic Party itself. With primaries taking place on August 4, all eyes are on the battle between progressive candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and establishment candidate Haley Stephens to see who will represent Democrats in the general election. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez sits down with El-Sayed to talk about his campaign, the civil war within the Democratic party, and about fighting corporate oligarchy and MAGA fascism at the same time.
Credits:
Videography: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Maximillian Alvarez, David Hebden
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Speaker 1:
Michigan is shaping up to be one of the most closely watched Senate races of this entire cycle.
Speaker 2:
Democrats will choose between Congresswoman Haley Stevens and former director of the Department of Health, Human and Veterans Services, Wayne County, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:
We pay more for the stuff we got to buy, get paid less for the work that we do and watch as our tax dollars get misappropriated abroad to drop bombs on other people’s kids instead of to invest in our own kids and their schools and their healthcare.
Speaker 4:
We’re done. Business as usual politics is over.
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed:
Most people don’t walk around thinking, where do I stand on the left right spectrum? Most people walk around thinking, how am I going to afford my groceries? How am I going to pay for my rent? Can I ever afford a home? What am I going to do if I get sick? The majority of Democrats
Since losing the 2020 election, President Donald Trump has put forward a lot of ideas to change how America votes.
Some, like hand-counting all ballots, are nonstarters. Others, like restricting mail voting, have proven a tough sell in states where it’s popular, including Republican-leaning ones. And a handful have become mainstream Republican positions, including imposing stricter voter ID and requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote.
Democrats have generally opposed those proposals, arguing that they would do more to make voting harder than to prevent the relatively rare cases of election fraud.
But one Trump proposal deserves a second look: speeding up election results.
Elections results often come in slowly because officials are verifying signatures on mail-in ballots, allowing more time for mail ballots sent by Election Day to arrive and giving voters whose ballots were initially rejected opportunities to fix the issue and have them counted. Those are important safeguards for both access and accuracy. But there are other ways to get faster results that don’t have those trade-offs.
Dismissing the goal of faster results carries its own risks. Polls show overwhelming support for faster election night results among both Democrats and Republicans. Research indicates that unexpectedly slow vote counts can undermine trust in the results. And there are ways to speed up results considerably without making it harder for people to cast their ballots and get them counted.
Trump demonstrated why faster counting matters.
Ironically, Trump himself demonstrated why faster counting matters.
Just hours after polls closed in 2020, he began casting doubt on incomplete returns, pointing to the normal shifts that occur as large batches of ballots are reported from different jurisdictions as supposed