Category: Latest News

Supreme Court upholds GOP voting restrictions in Arizona

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The Supreme Court today upheld a pair of voting restrictions in Arizona, likely paving the way for new limitations across the country.

Why it matters: It’s the court’s biggest voting rights decision in several years. Conservatives’ victory in the 6-3 ruling, authored by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, is a sign of what’s to come. 

Details: The case concerned two voting restrictions in Arizona. The state invalidates ballots that are cast in the wrong precinct, and it also bans the practice known as “ballot harvesting,” in which third parties collect and return other people’s ballots.

The Memo: Trump faces legal and political peril

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Former President Trump’s attempts to remain politically powerful and position himself as a viable 2024 candidate could hit a big hurdle.

Prosecutors in New York look to be on the brink of leveling criminal charges against the Trump Organization, according to recent reports from The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Much remains unclear — and it is still technically possible that no charges will be brought, even though Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance Jr. (D) empaneled a new grand jury in May. But if charges are leveled, they will deal a heavy blow to the former president regardless of whether he is himself accused. Continue reading.

Minnesota House of Representatives adjourns 2021 special session

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SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA — Today, the Minnesota House of Representatives finished approving a new two-year state budget and adjourned sine die. The Minnesota House, controlled by Democrats, and the Minnesota Senate, controlled by Republicans, convened for a special session on June 14th to finalize a bipartisan budget agreement for the next two years.

“Despite divided government, we found compromise and made significant investments to help those who sacrificed the most during a challenging year,” said House Speaker Melissa Hortman. “While this agreement does not contain everything we would have liked, we worked together and achieved a compromise that is in the best interests of Minnesotans. House DFLers will continue working to build a Minnesota that works better for everyone.” 

“Workers and families are climbing out of an extremely challenging year, and they need their state government to help them emerge stronger with more opportunities to get ahead,” said Majority Leader Ryan Winkler. “The decisions made by the Legislature have real consequences. We can choose to build a state where all Minnesotans have economic security and can live with dignity, or we can choose to rig the system to benefit corporations, the rich, and well-connected.” 

House Democrats are proud to have secured many investments in families, workers, students, and small businesses who’ve been hit hardest by the pandemic, including:

  • A historic increase in funding for public schools and preservation of all day pre-K for 4,000 preschoolers
  • Financial support for frontline workers who sacrificed their health to keep all of us safe during the pandemic  
  • Investments in access to affordable child care for families and increased funding for providers
  • Rental assistance for tenants and landlords and expanded access to affordable housing
  • Tax cuts for workers and small businesses impacted by the pandemic
  • Investments to improve public health and reduce racial disparities in health care
  • State aid for small businesses damaged during last year’s civil unrest
  • Investments in transit, roads, bridges, and rail
  • Substantial reforms to sexual assault laws to bring justice to survivors
  • Measures to reform policing and increase accountability
  • Investments in families who are at risk of or are experiencing homelessness
  • Delivering an overdue pay raise for personal care attendants and additional support for home and community-based services to help people live independently
  • Substantial investments to reduce racial disparities and improve equity
  • Funding for the Market Bucks program to provide healthy and affordable farmers’ market produce to SNAP/EBT users

As a result of a bipartisan deal to end Governor Walz’s emergency powers on July 1, the Legislature will not convene for a July special session or continue meeting monthly as it has done since the pandemic began. 

I’m a scholar of critical race theory — here’s the reality about it behind the conservative moral panic

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Critical race theory (CRT) is the current conservative media boogeyman spreading moral panic about poor white people being confronted with the history of racism in the United States. Claims about critical race theory range from plausible but incorrect (it’s about white privilege and white people’s racism) to outlandish and bizarre (it supports a white genocide and confiscating all white people’s property). The truth of critical race theory is that it’s a socio-legal framework for analyzing the disparate impact of policies on marginalized communities, most often Black people.

OK, but what does that mean? Since CRT was an academic methodology taught in law schools and advanced college courses until recently, those who truly understand CRT often speak in academic language that can be difficult to understand. However, unlike a lot of academic methodologies, CRT has clear and practical real-world applications. Due to its name and origin, people often believe it’s an overly theoretical study without concrete evidence. In reality, the scholarship in CRT is often based on the study of statistics, laws and legal cases (about as concrete as you can get).

Berkeley Law Professor Khiara Bridges, a scholar of intersectionality and reproductive rights, provided a list of key tenets of critical race theory in her book Critical Race Theory: A Primer. Professor Bridges argues that critical race theory is concerned with Justice (with a capital J) and is not a thought experiment or academic exercise. Her tenets are that CRT acknowledges that race is a social construction, not a biological reality, that racism is a normal embedded feature of American society (not an aberration), a rejection of traditional liberalism’s understandings of racism, and a connection between scholarship and people’s real lives. While Professor Bridge’s list of core tenets restate a lot of earlier CRT scholarship, it is relevant that her book was published in 2018 and continues to agree with the originators of CRT, such as Derrick Bell and Kimberle Crenshaw. Often, critics of CRT claim the origins are reasonable but the current state is what is problematic. As a newly minted CRT PhD, my scholarship remains loyal to the origins and agrees with Professor Bridge’s core tenets. Continue reading.

Minnesota House approves bipartisan tax bill

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SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA — This afternoon, the Minnesota House of Representatives approved a bipartisan compromise with the Minnesota Senate that will provide targeted tax cuts to workers and small businesses harmed by the pandemic, expand the Working Family Tax Credit, and provide new aid for counties to fund services and programs that prevent family homelessness. 

“This is a tax bill that helps both workers who lost their jobs and the small businesses that fell on hard times during the pandemic,” said Rep. Paul Marquart (DFL-Dilworth), chair of the House Taxes Committee. “As Minnesota rebounds from a global pandemic, there is more work to do to level the playing field, bring about more fairness in our tax system, and fund important investments in people.”

The Legislature’s bipartisan tax bill uses federal aid from the American Rescue Plan to provide targeted tax cuts for workers who received unemployment insurance benefits and small businesses that received federal Paycheck Protection Program loans. Democrats say a deal without benefits for both workers and small businesses would have been unacceptable. 

Continue reading “Minnesota House approves bipartisan tax bill”

Barr sparks new political firestorm

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Former Attorney General William Barr has created a political firestorm with interviews for a new book that call former President Trump’s claims about fraud in last year’s election “bullshit” and detail how Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) pressed him to publicly dispute Trump’s assertions.

Barr has enraged Democrats and liberal commentators who say he is seeking to rehabilitate an image badly damaged by the Trump years, when he was a forceful advocate for the president, particularly during the release of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.

They say that Barr contributed to Trump’s narrative undermining confidence in the voting system with his own comments about mail-in ballots in the lead-up to the election.  Continue reading.

McConnell Admits He Tolerated Trump’s Election Lies For Political Expediency

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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell confirmed in an account published Sunday that he declined to publicly confront former President Donald Trump’s election lies because he did not want to upset Trump and wanted to win Senate elections in Georgia.

The Atlantic‘s Jonathan Karl reported that ahead of two January runoff Senate elections in Georgia, McConnell told then-Attorney General William Barr that he wanted Barr to confront Trump over his lies about the 2020 election results and would not do so himself.

“Look, we need the president in Georgia,” he said. According to Karl’s reporting, McConnell was afraid Trump would “sabotage” the Georgia campaigns if he declared Joe Biden had won the election. “And so we cannot be frontally attacking him right now. But you’re in a better position to inject some reality into this situation. You are really the only one who can do it.” Continue reading.

QAnon congresswoman predicts Arizona audit will prove Bill Barr let Trump’s victory be stolen

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Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-GA) latest conspiracy is that former Attorney General Bill Barr is secretly part of the anti-Trump resistance.

According to Greene, Barr knew that the 2020 election was won by Donald Trump, but refused to fight for him. It’s for that reason that Greene thinks the GOP “audits” must continue, because they’ll vindicate Trump’s “Big Lie.”

“When that comes out, and the truth has shown that perhaps election fraud did happen, and President (Donald) Trump really won. then we’re going to see people that should have acted like William Barr, like our secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, and many others, we’re going to see them with mud on their faces,” Greene rambled to Newsmax on Monday. Continue reading.

Wisconsin Doctors Slam Johnson For Hosting Anti-Vaccination Event

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Medical experts are criticizing Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) for his decision to hold a vaccine skepticism event even as most new deaths connected to the COVID-19 pandemic are occurring among unvaccinated people.

Johnson announced on Friday that he would hold a media event the following Monday to discuss purported adverse reactions to the vaccines. The senator said that he would be joined at the event by the wife of a former Green Bay Packers player who claims to have experienced problems after being vaccinated.

Johnson told a local outlet he was not anti-vaccine, but insisted, “I don’t think you can ignore some of the issues, some of the problems.” Continue reading.

Trump has now blamed both Barr and McConnell for Biden’s victory – and a presidential historian just published a hilarious response

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Republican infighting continues to escalate in the GOP’s civil war over who is to blame for Joe Biden living in the White House.

Donald Trump has refused to concede that he decisively lost the 2020 presidential election to Biden, who received over 7 million more votes than the incumbent.

With Trump refusing to admit defeat, Republicans have spent little time debating why they lost the White House despite all of the advantages of incumbency. Instead, they have focused on what happened after Trump’s defeat as he sought to overturn the results. Continue reading.