by Steve Benen | Jul 13, 2026 | 2026 election, Maddowblog, News, Politics
Sen. Lindsey Graham’s unexpected death over the weekend will have broad implications on Capitol Hill, and the effects will be felt quickly. The South Carolina Republican was poised to play an important role on a variety of pending measures — defense spending, Todd Blanche’s attorney general nomination, new sanctions on Russia, et al. — and his sudden passing, coupled with Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell’s absence, adds new complexities to an already challenging dynamic.
What’s more, Graham chaired the Senate Budget Committee, which was also in the process of tackling several key issues, including pending spending bills that need to pass to avoid a government shutdown in the fall.
But that’s not the only complexity surrounding the late senator’s death.
Graham appeared well positioned to win a fifth term in the fall, which means there will now be two parallel processes unfolding simultaneously: one to fill his vacancy in the Senate in the short term, and another to replace him on the November ballot.
On the former, South Carolina’s outgoing Republican governor, Henry McMaster, will soon choose a replacement to serve out the final five months of Graham’s current term. Even this exercise won’t be entirely straightforward: McMaster could choose a caretaker, who’d serve the rest of the year with no further ambitions, or the governor could select a Republican who intends to run for the seat in the fall, effectively creating an appointed incumbent who’d have a leg up on would-be rivals.
For now, it’s not clear which way the governor is leaning, though McMaster reportedly met with Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette on Sunday to discuss the interim appointment. (Evette recently came up short in
by Sheree Renée Thomas | Jul 10, 2026 | Opinion, Politics
To walk through Memphis is to step into an eerie, simultaneous haunting, both visible and invisible. You see armed soldiers and federal agents everywhere in Memphis: an uncanny, disruptive presence woven into the mundane fabric of our daily lives. Since they arrived in September, they have become a disturbingly normalized fixture. Some roll through our neighborhoods in plain clothes, driving ordinary Sprinter vans, looking for all the world like tourists who got lost on their way to Beale Street. Others are suited out in khaki and camel-colored camouflage, standing like insolent, bored sentinels guarding the food court at the mall, or checking over shopping baskets at local chain stores. When they first arrived, they stood starkly in front of our small, independent businesses, their heavy presence strangling the life out of local commerce and destroying decades of hard-won community goodwill and trust.
The anger after Johnson’s homicide is an order of magnitude higher.
Even before the National Guard shot and killed 20-year-old Tyrin Johnson July 4 weekend, the reality of this dystopian visitation was laid bare by MLK50, which published dashcam and body camera footage documenting the seemingly pretextual traffic stop of 18-year-old Yasser Lopez Soza and three of his Memphis Business Academy classmates. The minors were headed to their season-opening soccer game when they were pulled over. The footage captures a Homeland Security agent riding shotgun inside a Memphis Police Department cruiser, evidence that exposed as a lie the city’s repeated vow that Memphis police would never assist in federal immigration dragnets.
But the anger after Johnson’s homicide is an order of magnitude higher. It happened at nearly 4 a.m. Sunday, July
by Steve Benen | Jul 10, 2026 | 2026 election, elections, Maddowblog, News, Politics
In the wake of the 2000 elections, there was one thing Democrats and Republicans could agree on: The entire election cycle was a mess that exposed structural and institutional flaws that required reforms.
It wasn’t easy, but Congress ultimately passed the Help America Vote Act (better known as HAVA) in 2002, which included a variety of constructive changes and created a new entity called the Election Assistance Commission.
In the 24 years that followed, the EAC wasn’t particularly controversial. The point of the commission, as its name implies, is to assist state and local election administrators with training, security grants, voluntary election management guidelines and detailed information on best practices, including specifications for testing and certifying election equipment.
There was no reason to gut the commission. Donald Trump did it anyway. MS NOW reported:
President Donald Trump fired the remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission on Thursday, a White House official confirmed to MS NOW.
The move effectively leaves the bipartisan agency without any commissioners and unable to carry out its official duties just months before the 2026 midterm elections.
For all of the Republicans’ overwrought rhetoric about “election security” and “election integrity,” the gutting of the EAC moves the nation in the opposite direction.
Until very recently, such a move wouldn’t have just been seen as a power grab, it also would have been recognized as legally dubious. Commission members are Senate-confirmed officials serving on an independent agency. The idea that a president could just send them an email and push them into unemployment was unrealistic.
But after Republican-appointed justices on the Supreme Court issued their ruling in Trump v. Slaughter early last week, the executive
by Allison Detzel | Jul 10, 2026 | 2026 election, Congress, News, Politics
Joe Scarborough issued a warning to Washington Democrats as the race to replace Graham Platner on Maine’s Senate ballot begins: Stay out of it.
The “Morning Joe” host said establishment members of the party should steer clear of interfering in the process and let Democrats in Maine choose who will face Republican Sen. Susan Collins in November.
“Washington needs to stay out of this, and Maine Democrats need to figure out who is going to replace Graham Platner on the ballot,” he advised.
Scarborough shared some of what he has heard from voters on the ground in the state since a scandal over sexual assault accusations imploded the oyster farmer’s campaign earlier this week. The MS NOW host said there have been rumors for months of a “conspiracy” to bring down Platner.
“Rank-and-file Democrats who have been supporting Platner from the very beginning think that this was cooked up in Washington, D.C., with a lot of money behind it, to find anything that could be found to get Graham Platner off the ballot,” he said on Thursday.
While Scarborough dismissed evidence of a “conspiracy,” he warned out-of-state Democrats that any meddling could be seen as the establishment tipping the scales, which he said could backfire in November.
“If Washington thinks they can micromanage this and fix this,” he said, “they’re going to piss off their base, and their base won’t come out and vote in the general election. They just won’t.”
You can watch Scarborough’s full analysis in the clip at the top of the page.
The post Joe Scarborough warns Washington: Let Maine Democrats decide who replaces Platner appeared first on MS NOW.
by Steve Benen | Jul 9, 2026 | Maddowblog, News, Politics
As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump vowed to reject “the politics of personal profit” and to stand up to those who have gone to the nation’s capital and “lined their pockets.” As a president, however, Trump has taken a dramatically different path.
In the first year of his second term, the Republican pulled in at least $2.2 billion, including more than $1.4 billion in cryptocurrency-related income, according to his latest annual financial disclosure.
No other president in American history has ever seen such financial gains while in office, and as a related analysis from The New York Times explained, “Mr. Trump’s profits are a haul once unimaginable for any leader of a liberal democracy, particularly a sitting American president. No modern Western leader has ever publicly disclosed such big windfalls while in office. The Trump family’s earnings, experts said, have moved him into an echelon of enrichment more associated with strongmen in Russia and Turkey.”
As a rule, many of the president’s allies have said very little about this, though Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota keeps trying to put a positive spin on the breathtaking developments.
During a recent appearance on Fox Business, for example, host Maria Bartiromo noted that many Democrats want to prohibit sitting presidents from engaging in crypto endeavors while in office. Cramer replied that he rejects the idea “that somehow Donald Trump has to be exempt from being successful.”
Except success is irrelevant. What matters is both the propriety of a sitting president pocketing vast wealth from a venture his administration helps oversee and the legal concerns surrounding the Constitution’s emoluments clause.
Nevertheless, this week, the same GOP senator appeared
by Allison Detzel | Jul 9, 2026 | Crime & Courts, Donald Trump, News, Politics, Supreme Court
Nicolle Wallace told President Donald Trump that it’s time to “move on” as the president doubles down on what she called his “desperate last-ditch” efforts to fight his mounting courtroom defeats.
On Wednesday, a Manhattan judge ordered the president to pay E. Jean Carroll $5 million after a jury found that Trump sexually abused the writer three decades ago and later defamed her. That ruling came days after the Supreme Court rejected the president’s appeal in the case.
But as the “Deadline: White House” host noted, that wasn’t the only court loss the president suffered that day. In Washington, D.C., a federal appeals court once again denied a request from the Kennedy Center’s board to return Trump’s name to the building.
On the heels of those losses, Wallace said it’s time for the president to finally accept defeat.
“We need a new word for ‘over,’” she said. “Legally, these cases are so over, we need new ways to explain to our audience how over they are.”
Pointing to the Carroll case, the MS NOW host explained that the president had already appealed to the Supreme Court, which she said was the “end of the road in our system,” adding, “It’s over. He owes the money.”
As for the Kennedy Center, she offered this advice for Trump: “Pull the tarp down. Suffer your humiliation, and move on.”
Wallace said Trump’s inability to accept defeat has put an “extraordinary strain” on the country’s judges and legal system.
“[In] just about every story we cover, Trump, including through his Justice Department, abuses the system, does something either flagrantly illegal or unconstitutional, and it falls to judges to be the guardrail,” she
