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J.D. Prose|Pennsylvania State Capital Bureau

Roundtable on Mail-in Ballots in PA

Mail-in ballots have become an increasingly popular voting method among voters across Pennsylvania, but they also often remain a target of accusations of voter fraud.

Chris Ullery, Bucks County Courier Times

In the latest attack on Pennsylvanias mail-in voting option, 14Republican state House members filed a lawsuitasking a court to invalidate mail-inballoting by claiming it is unconstitutional.

Lawmakers argued in the suit filed late Tuesday in Pennsylvania Commonwealth Courtthat Act 77, under which no-excuse mail-in voting was allowed, violates the state and U.S. constitutions and should have been pursued through a state constitutional amendment, even though11 ofthemvoted for the legislation in 2019.

TheGOPlegislators on the lawsuit are:

"Last year, over 2.5 million Pennsylvanians embraced mail-in voting and other safe secure and modern forms of voting which Act 77 allowed for the first time in the commonwealth," said Lyndsay Kensinger, a spokesperson for Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf.

"The fact that members of the General Assembly who voted for Act 77 and were chosen for office in elections in which it was in effect are now suing to overturn it is hypocritical and a betrayal of voters," Kensinger said. "We should continue to modernize our election system and make it more convenient for voters to make their voices heard. Instead these members are seeking to silence voters as they perpetuate false claims of a stolen election."

However, Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a likely Democratic candidate for governor in 2022, said Thursday on Twitter: This lawsuit is not only the height of hypocrisy, but it also has real consequences and damages public trust in our elections.

After initially supporting mail-in voting, Republicans havefollowed former President Donald Trumps calls against the practice andlaunched several legal attacks on the process, althoughnone of them have been successful.

Trump began baselessly warning about mail-in voting fraud last year before the November election when it became clear that Democrats were flocking to mailed ballots amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

More than 2.6 million Pennsylvania voters used mail-in voting in November with Democrats accounting for 1.7 million, nearly three times the number of Republicans.

More: Wolf, Democrats say Pa. already had election audits and Biden won

More: A bill overhauling Pa.'s election law could soon pass the House. What's the fight over?

As Trumps evidence-free claims continue, Republican lawmakers have repeatedly called into question the results of the presidential election, but not the races that theywon.

On Thursday, the state Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee announced that it has created a webpage for Pennsylvania voters to submit sworn testimony about theirvotingexperiencesand any irregularities they have witnessed.

The effort is part of what committee Chairman Sen. Cris Dush, R-Jefferson County, called an election integrity investigation.Testimony can be submitted athttps://intergovernmental.pasenategop.com/electioninvestigation/.

Dush recently replaced state Sen. Doug Mastriano, R-Franklin County, as committee chairman after Mastriano was removed amid bickering with Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman over the committees efforts to subpoena records from York, Tioga and Philadelphia counties.

Mastriano has been at the forefront of the movement questioning the 2020 election results and was part of a Republican group that visited Arizona to review the GOP-led election audit there.

Dush also said that the committee will hold public hearings and request documents from counties and the Pennsylvania Department of State to conduct a comprehensive election investigationincluding potentially using the committees subpoena powers, according to a statement.

More: Here's why state Sen. Doug Mastriano says Pa. election audit 'stopped for the time being'

More: Mastriano: Democrats using 'scare tactics' in telling Pa. counties to ignore election audit

J.D. Prose is a reporter for the USA TODAY Network's Pennsylvania State Capital Bureau. He can be reached at jprose@gannett.com.

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GOP state lawmakers file lawsuit to have mail-in voting tossed out. Who is suing - GoErie.com

The American right has been drunk on its freedom from two kinds of inhibition since Donald Trump appeared to guide them into the promised land of their unleashed ids. One is the inhibition from lies, the other from violence. Both are ways members of civil society normally limit their own actions out of respect for the rights of others and the collective good. Those already strained limits have snapped for leading Republican figures, from Tucker Carlson on Fox News to Ted Cruz in the Senate and for their followers.

Weve watched those followers gulp down delusions from Pizzagate to Qanon to Covid denialism to Trumps election lies. And rough up journalists, crash vehicles into and wave weapons at Black Lives Matter and other anti-racist protesters at least since Charlottesville, menace statehouses, issue threats to doctors and school boards testifying about public health, and plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, for imposing Covid-prevention protocols.

The Texas abortion law that the rightwing supreme court just smiled upon, despite its violation of precedent, seethes with both violence and lies. The very language of the law is a lie, a familiar one in which six-week embryos are called fetuses and a heartbeat is attributed to the cluster of cells that is not yet a heart not yet powering a circulatory system.

Behind it are other lies, in which women have abortions because they are reckless, wanton and callous, rather than, in the great number of cases, because of the failure of birth control, or coercive sex, or medical problems, including threats to the health of the mother or a non-viable pregnancy, and financial problems, including responsibility for existing children.

But what was new about the Texas bill is its invitation to its residents to become vigilantes, bounty hunters and snitches. This will likely throw a woman who suspects she is pregnant into a hideous state of fearful secrecy, because absolutely anyone can profit off her condition and anyone who aids her, from the driver to the doctor, is liable. It makes pregnancy a crime, since it is likely to lead to the further criminalization even of the significant percentage of pregnancies that end in miscarriage. It will lead women particularly the undocumented, poor, the young, those under the thumbs of abusive spouses or families to die of life-threatening pregnancies or illicit abortions or suicide out of despair. A vigilante who goes after a woman is willing to see her die.

The rightwing stance on abortion is often treated as a contradiction coming from a political sector that sings in praise of unfettered liberty to do as you like, including carry semiautomatic weapons in public and spread a sometimes fatal virus. But like the attack on voting rights in Texas happening simultaneously with the attack on reproductive rights, it is of course about expanding liberty for some while withering it away for others. The attacks on reproductive rights seek to make women unfree and unequal; the attacks on voting rights seek to make people of color unfree and unequal; women of color get a double dose.

This is the logical outcome of a party that, some decades back, looked at an increasingly non-white country and decided to try to suppress the votes of people of color rather than win them. Not just the Democratic party but democracy is their enemy. In this system in which some animals are more equal than others, some have the right to determine the truth more than others, and facts, science, history are likewise fetters to be shaken loose in pursuit of exactly your very own favorite version of reality, which you enforce through dominance, including outright violence.

What was the 6 January coup attempt but this practice writ large? A mountain of lies about the outcome of an election was used to whip up a vigilante mob into an attack not just on Congress but on the ratification of the election results and death threats against the vice-president and against Speaker Pelosi. The sheer berserker-style violence of it was extraordinary, the mostly middle-aged mostly white mostly men trying to gouge out eyeballs and trampling their own underfoot while screaming and spraying bear spray in the faces of those guarding the building and the elected officials within and the election.

Their leaders produced lies that instigated the violence, lies to justify that violence, lies to deny the existence of that violence, and then lies to stir up further violence. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, who by his own account furiously begged Trump to call off the attackers, has since been trying to sabotage the investigation into what happened.

As the New York Times reported this week: Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, has threatened to retaliate against any company that complies with the congressional committee investigating the January 6 riot, after the panel asked dozens of firms to preserve the phone and social media records of 11 far-right members of Congress who pushed to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He is trying to prevent Congress and the public from knowing what has gone on. Which you could also call covering up a crime, in public, and his threats may themselves constitute crimes.

Madison Cawthorn, the North Carolina freshman congressman who appeared onstage on 6 January to whip up the crowd, calls the rioters political prisoners and continues to lie about the outcome of the 2020 election, declaring: If our election systems continue to be rigged, continue to be stolen, its going to lead to one place and thats bloodshed. Cawthorne, like the Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, like Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, whose votes set the Texas abortion law into action on Wednesday, has been accused of sexual misconduct.

While men across the political spectrum are accused of similar wrongdoing Andrew Cuomos conduct led to New York getting its first female governor last month in the Republican case it is not an ideological inconsistency. The ideological premise is that ones own rights matter so much that others rights do not matter at all, and that goes from rape to mask and vaccine policies to the proliferation of guns and gun deaths in recent years.

There is no clear way to tell if the right is emboldened because theyve gotten away with so much in the past five years, or whether theyre increasingly desperate because they are in a wild gamble, but it seems like both at once. If the US defends its democracy, such as it is, and protects the voting rights of all eligible adults, the right will continue to be a shrinking minority. Their one chance of overturning that requires overturning democracy itself. Thats one goal theyre willing to use violence to achieve and no longer bothering to lie about.

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Republicans seethe with violence and lies. Texas is part of a bigger war theyre waging - The Guardian

On the evening of July 19, several dozen Republican donors gathered for dinner in a private room at the St. Regis Aspen to hear Nikki Haley deliver a speech. The former South Carolina governor had been invited by the Republican Governors Association, which was holding its typically drama-free summer meeting at the exclusive Rocky Mountain resort. It would be a prime platform for Haley to court 27 red-state governors as she lays the groundwork for a future presidential run. But when Haley took the stage, attendees noticed that Florida governor Ron DeSantis was conspicuously absent. According to an attendee, DeSantis was holding his own fundraiser 20 miles up the road in Basalt, Colorado. Ron was pissed he didnt get asked to speak, the attendee later recalled.

Welcome to the 2024 Republican presidential primary.

At this nascent stage, its common for prospective candidates to compete fiercely for donor dollars and Fox News airtime. But the 2024 contest is playing out like no other in memory. Thats because the race is either entirely wide open or over before it begins. The outcome hinges on the whims, grievances, and obsessions of one Donald J. Trump.

The 45th president retains a psychic grip on the MAGA-fied Republican base more than six months after leaving office despite two impeachments, the horrors of the January 6 Capitol riot, and nearly 350,000 U.S. COVID-19 deaths. In July, Trump dominated the Conservative Political Action Committee straw poll with 70 percent of the vote. (DeSantis came in a distant second, with 21 percent.) Its a metaphysical impossibility that anybody, even a senator named Jesus H. Christ, could beat Trump in a Republican primary if he runs, said Michael Caputo, a veteran of Trumps 2016 campaign who briefly served as spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services.

The candidates know this. Haley, who served as Trumps U.N. ambassador, told The Associated Press in April that she wouldnt run if Trump did. Others, such as DeSantis, Texas senator Ted Cruz, and former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, tell reporters theyre merely focused on the midterms. But just because candidates wont openly challenge Trump doesnt mean theyre not testing the waters in the event Trump doesnt jump in. If Trump doesnt run, youre going to have 2016 on steroids. There will be 25 to 30 people running for president, a prominent Republican said. Could the field include Tucker Carlson? Sean Hannity? Even congresswoman conspiracist Marjorie Taylor Greene? Anythings possible.

The race is entirely WIDE OPEN or OVER before it begins.

Given Trumps long history of turning will-he-or-wont-he speculation into a media spectacle, theres little chance hell declare his 2024 intentions until after the midterms at the earliest. I think that people will be very happy with my decision, Trump told me when we spoke in mid-August. He was on the phone from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Removed from office, his mood was relaxed and upbeat. I think MAGA is stronger than its ever been before, he said. Trump particularly relished New York governor Andrew Cuomos resignation, announced two days before. I thought he was a tough guy. Maybe he wasnt, Trump said.

Mostly, though, Trump seemed to enjoy watching his potential 2024 rivals being forced to anticipate his next move. Knowing Trump, hell dangle it right up to the New Hampshire primary filing deadline, a Trump confidant told me. Which means candidates are stuck waiting for Trump to get in or get out while they pretend not to be campaigning even as they knife one another behind the scenes. Its a holding pattern, a frustrated Haley adviser said. Its unlike any previous race.

After Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama in 2012, the Republican National Committee famously commissioned an autopsy to diagnose the partys problems with voters. The internal review produced a 100-page report that advised candidates to broaden the partys appeal to Hispanics, Blacks, and women. Three years later, that blueprint was blown up when Trump descended his golden escalator and labeled Mexican immigrants rapists. The Republican Party became a cult of personality, said Sally Bradshaw, a former Jeb Bush adviser who coauthored the 2012 RNC autopsy. (Bradshaw quit the GOP in 2016. She now runs an independent bookstore in Tallahassee, Florida.)

Republicans didnt even bother with a self-assessment following Trumps loss to Joe Biden. The reason there wasnt an audit this time is the people left in the party dont care about solving problems, Bradshaw said. If anything, the partys takeaway from 2020 is that the base wants it to become more Trumpian. A Reuters/Ipsos poll in May reported that 61 percent of Republicans agree with Trumps big lie, that Biden stole the election. A Politico poll in June found that 3 in 10 Republicans subscribed to the conspiracy theory that Trump will be reinstated as president.

In July, I called Roger Stone to hear his take on which GOP candidates are best positioned to inherit the MAGA mantle. Stone, after all, was the architect of Trumps political career, which began when Trump flirted with a presidential run in 1988 to promote The Art of the Deal. Its very difficult to fill Trumps shoes in the America First movement, Stone said. It cant be handed off like a baton. Stone also believes the 2024 primary will be the first Republican contest in memory that hasnt been shaped by Fox News. The rise of more strident MAGA outlets like One America News and Newsmax have opened new avenues to connect with the base. I dont think Fox will wield the same influence that they did in the past, Stone said. The most loyal and religious Fox viewers have moved on.

If it were up to Stone, Michael Flynn would be the partys 2024 nominee, which, Stone acknowledges, is highly unlikely. (Both Stone and Flynn received pardons from Trump for felony convictions related to the Mueller investigation.) Of the other potential contenders, Stone is most impressed with DeSantis.

The people left in the party dont care about SOLVING PROBLEMS.

Since being elected Floridas governor in 2018, the 43-year-old former congressman has deftly positioned himself as a mini-Trump. He rebuffed public health guidelines during the nadir of the COVID-19 pandemic and kept Florida virtually free of a statewide lockdown in 2020. In May, he signed a restrictive voting rights bill live on Fox News. And in June, DeSantis dispatched Florida law enforcement agents to Texas to secure [the] southern border. According to one recent conservative poll, DeSantis beat Trump with a 74 percent approval rating. (Trump scored 71 percent.) One former Trump adviser recently texted me a photo of DeSantis merch: a hat that said DeSantis 2024: Make America Florida.

DeSantis has also built a powerful fundraising machine. According to the Miami Herald, his political action committee raised almost $14 million in April, bringing its total haul to about $31.6 million. Hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin made a $5 million donation. DeSantis is the most valuable player this year. Hes Trump without the negatives, said Scott Reed, the former chief strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

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The Race to Inherit Trumps MAGA Base Is Already OnAnd the Knives Are Out - Vanity Fair

A hiring sign. Illustrated | iStock

It was true in 2020 and it's true now: We're not going to be able to fix the economy until the pandemic is brought under control.

The Labor Department reported Friday that employers added just 235,000 non-farm jobs to their payrolls in August lower than expected, and a sharp drop from June and July. The problem? COVID-19 has made a big, ugly comeback, hurting the retail and hospitality sectors in particular. "Delta's fingerprints are alllll over this report," economics writer Catherine Rampell said on Twitter.

For much of the early pandemic era, Republicans told Americans we had a choice between protecting ourselves from COVID or letting the economy thrive. Who can forget when Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick urged senior citizens to "take a chance on their survival" for the sake of the country's financial well-being? And then-President Trump continually railed against his own government's lockdown recommendations and the effect they were having on his administration's economic numbers. "We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself," he said last year.

But the Delta surge is proving that it's impossible to disentangle the country's economic health from its health health. While some states and locales are reimposing mask mandates particularly in schools the lockdown era in America is pretty much over. People are free to conduct business as they like. Right now, with the risk of infection still lurking, they're clearly hesitant.

Ironically, it's probably Republican governors who are now holding back the economy. Many of them ended their states' enhanced unemployment programs early research shows that action didn't really increase employment, but it did cause a $2 billion reduction in household spending. And states like Florida and Texas are prohibiting businesses from requiring "vaccine passports" that would let customers know they're entering a (literally) safe space. "Why would you prevent people from enacting policies that give their customers the assurance, the confidence that they can walk into a business, and that they'll be safe?" asked one Florida state representative. Many customers have decided to stay home instead.

Story continues

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Republicans should read the disappointing jobs reports very carefully - Yahoo News

CLEVELAND, Ohio Ohio House Republicans said Wednesday that former Rep. Doug Green died after contracting COVID-19.

Green, of Brown County near Cincinnati, was a member of the Ohio House of Representatives from 2013 through 2020. He was 66.

Green was under treatment for coronavirus for several weeks, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Doug was one of my best friends in the Ohio House of Representatives, said former state Rep. Gary Scherer, a Pickaway County Republican, in a Facebook post. He was the former Auditor of Brown County. No Matter how late of a night we had in Columbus, he always made the 2+ hour drive home every night to help with family commitments. A great guy.

Greens wife Norma said in a Facebook post the family is making arrangements for a celebration of his life at a later time.

Ohio House Speaker Bob Cupp, a Lima Republican, said green personified capable, constructive and caring public service.

He had a great spirit, warmth, and cheerfulness and connected with people in a way that was truly special, and helped make him an effective leader and state representative, Cupp said in a statement. A personal trademark was a consistent use of something green in his clothing around the Statehouse. I will miss Doug.

Andrew Tobias and Jeremy Pelzer contributed reporting.

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Republican former Ohio state representative dies after weeks of being treated for COVID-19 in hospital - cleveland.com