Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) plans to obstruct every one of President-elect Joe Biden’s Cabinet confirmations unless Donald Trump concedes.
Trump, of course, has vowed never to do so.
“As long as there’s litigation ongoing, and the election result is disputed, I do not think you will see the Senate act to confirm any nominee,” Cruz said in an Axios interview on Wednesday. Continue reading.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton this week sued four key battleground states lost by President Donald Trump in the hopes of overturning the 2020 presidential election.
Legal experts have picked apart the lawsuit and have said it stands little chance of even being heard by the United States Supreme Court, let alone succeeding.
And according to University of Texas School of Law professor Stephen Vladeck, Trump may have further undermined an already-shaky case with a tweet that he posted on Wednesday morning. Continue reading.
And to protect their political future.
Hundreds of elected and appointed Republicans around the country are backing President Donald Trump’s false claims he won the 2020 presidential election, a widespread embrace that is likely to empower Trump’s grip over the GOP even after he leaves office and turn belief in Trump’s falsehoods into a litmus test for a significant segment of Republican voters.
The Republicans embracing Trump’s cause, and the nonsensical conspiracy theories used to justify it, come from every level of government. They include prominent senators like Texas’ Ted Cruz, ambitious attorneys general, well-known conservative bombthrowers and little-known state legislators. They are egged on by a vocal portion of GOP voters who refuse to accept President-elect Joe Biden’s victory, and are unlikely to change their minds anytime soon.
“This is going to be a long-term litmus test for some Republicans. Even though Trump’s leaving office, he’s not going to let go of the reins of the party,” said Ryan Williams, a GOP operative who was a top spokesman for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. He contrasted Trump with former Republican President George W. Bush: “He’s not going to go back to Crawford, Texas, to paint portraits of dogs and foreign leaders.” Continue reading.
More than 1,500 lawyers condemned efforts by the Trump campaign’s legal team to reverse the election results in an open letter that urged the American Bar Association (ABA) to investigate the conduct of the team, including its leader, Rudolph W. Giuliani.
“President Trump’s barrage of litigation is a pretext for a campaign to undermine public confidence in the outcome of the 2020 election, which inevitably will subvert constitutional democracy,” the letter says. “Sadly, the President’s primary agents and enablers in this effort are lawyers, obligated by their oath and ethical rules to uphold the rule of law.”
The letter escalates the concerns of Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-N.J.) who on Nov. 20 filed complaints with ethics boards in five states calling for Giuliani and other members of the team to be investigated and disbarred. The criticism has been echoed in op-eds and letters by attorneys who have rebuked the team for filing frivolous lawsuits and tarnishing the legal profession. Continue reading.
The president’s baseless claims of voting fraud have prompted outrage among his loyalists and led to behavior that Democrats and even some Republicans say has become dangerous.
With a key deadline passing Tuesday that all but ends his legal challenges to the election, President Trump’s frenzied campaign to overturn the results has reached an inflection point: Certified slates of electors to the Electoral College are now protected by law, and any chance that a state might appoint a different slate that is favorable to Mr. Trump is essentially gone.
Despite his clear loss, Mr. Trump has shown no intention of stopping his sustained assault on the American electoral process. But his baseless conspiracy theories about voting fraud have devolved into an exercise in delegitimizing the election results, and the rhetoric is accelerating among his most fervent allies. This has prompted outrage among Trump loyalists and led to behavior that Democrats and even some Republicans say has become dangerous.
Supporters of the president, some of them armed, gathered outside the home of the Michigan secretary of state Saturday night. Racist death threats filled the voice mail of Cynthia A. Johnson, a Michigan state representative. Georgia election officials, mostly Republicans, say they have received threats of violence. The Republican Party of Arizona, on Twitter, twice called for supporters to be willing to “die for something” or “give my life for this fight.” Continue reading.
Christopher Krebs, the government’s former election security chief who was fired for describing the November vote as the most secure in history, sued the Trump campaign and one of the president’s lawyers for defamation Tuesday, claiming that the attorney falsely characterized his remarks as treasonous while suggesting that Krebs be “taken out at dawn and shot.”
In the legal action filed in a Maryland state court, Krebs characterized Joseph diGenova’s statements during a Nov. 30 Newsmax broadcast as “shockingly irresponsible and dangerous.”
The former Department of Homeland Security official asserted that diGenova’s commentary was especially troubling because it was “released into the current climate of political toxicity and instability, in which public officials across the country…are being targeted with acts and threats of violence simply for performing their public duties.” Continue reading.
President Donald Trump’s effort to snatch a second term through a series of state and federal court challenges has been flaming out for weeks. Now, the calendar has all but extinguished it.
Dec. 8 is the so-called “safe harbor” date for the presidential election, a milestone established in federal law for states to conclude any disputes over the results. Trump’s failure to gain traction in litigation, with his lawyers and allies failing to block crucial states from declaring Joe Biden the winner, means the safe harbor deadline stands as another potentially insurmountable reason for the courts to decline to intervene.
Trump’s legal team publicly says the safe harbor deadline is meaningless and they’ll simply disregard it. Set by a 140-year-old statute, the date isn’t enshrined in the Constitution, they say. But the campaign’s legal filings tell another story, as Trump’s lawyers pressed courts for urgent action ahead of the deadline midnight on Tuesday and warned of irreparable consequences if they don’t. Continue reading.
As President Donald Trump continues what critics have called a “narcissistic crusade” contesting his loss of the November election with lies and baseless lawsuits about election fraud and security, by Monday more than 1,500 attorneys across the country had signed on to a call for bar associations to condemn and investigate his campaign’s lawyers.
Although even some Trump allies like U.S. Attorney General William Barr have admitted there is no evidence of mass voter fraud that led to President-elect Joe Biden’s victory last month, the president’s attorneys have continued to pursue suits that “have become so transparently filed in bad faith that state and local officials are beginning to call for judges to sanction Trump campaign and Republican lawyers,” as Vox noted Saturday.
Those calls are coupled with the Lawyers Defending American Democracy (LDAD) open letter, which has now been signed by hundreds of attorneys—among them, former American Bar Association (ABA) and state bar presidents, retired federal judges and state Supreme Court justices, and former leaders of lawyer disciplinary bodies. Continue reading.
You can tell a lot about people by studying their priorities.
President Donald Trump is not spending too much time worrying about coronavirus surges and more than 270,000 Americans dead, as Dr. Anthony Fauci offers warnings about being vigilant while waiting for vaccine distribution. You did not hear the president express sympathy for those waiting in long lines for food over the holidays.
Instead, he has played a lot of golf and wailed on Twitter and television, refusing to accept his loss last month to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. Oh, yes, and the Justice Department found time to amend protocols to allow firing squads and electrocutions as a means to execute as many federal prisoners as possible before a new administration takes over. Continue reading.
No other advanced country conducts elections this way. Many European countries have instituted major restrictions on mail-in voting specifically because they recognize the nearly unlimited potential for fraud. Out of 42 European nations, all but two prohibit absentee ballots entirely for people who reside inside the country, or else they require those who need absentee ballots to show a very, very powerful ID.”
— President Trump, during a speech full of falsehoods about the presidential election, Dec. 2
The president’s 46-minute rant on the presidential election was filled with dozens of falsehoods, most of which we have previously checked. But he included one new claim that caught our interest. In contrast to many of the statements Trump makes, this one is not entirely made up from whole cloth.
Let’s take a look.
The Facts
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment, but it appears that Trump’s assertion is based on a detailed report issued in August by John R. Lott, who is normally known for his pro-gun research. The 140-page report examines the voting rules in 43 European countries, as well as the rules for developed members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
