Mediaboss Marketing

Republican lawmakers are pushing new bills that could further regulate which books should be allowed or disallowed in Maine's school libraries.

One would create a rating system and ban books from elementary or middle school libraries if they're not rated as age-appropriate. Another would issue a cease-and-desist order to schools that disseminate content that's found to be obscene by the attorney general or a district attorney.

That bill's sponsor, Republican Sen. James Libby of Standish, says it comes in response to recent efforts by parents to ban particular books, including the graphic novel "Gender Queer," from school libraries. He says his measure would offer a compromise that would only redact particular lines or images.

"We'd just be redacting some parts of some controversial books. And if you read the definition of what's obscene, we're drawing a line, but it's a pretty low line," he says.

But the measure faced opposition from teachers and librarians, who say it would override local control and the local book vetting process managed by educators and administrators as well as harm marginalized students.

Heather Perkinson, the president of the Maine Association of School Libraries, says schools already have a process for challenging books, and she worries the proposal would have a chilling effect.

"Who gets to decide what is obscene? I fear it would quickly become a politicized metric that would censor ideas and identities, targeting topics that get at the very heart of what the First Amendment enshrines," she says.

Attorney General Aaron Frey also says that the bill is unnecessary, as his office and district attorneys already have the authority to respond if someone is disseminating obscene material to minors.

Read more:
Republican proposals would add restrictions to books in Maine ... - Maine Public

At least eight of the 16 Georgia Republicans who convened in December 2020 to declare Donald Trump the winner of the presidential contest despite his loss in the state have accepted immunity deals from Atlanta-area prosecutors investigating alleged election interference, according to a lawyer for the electors.

Prosecutors with the office of Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis told the eight that they will not be charged with crimes if they testify truthfully in her sprawling investigation into efforts by Trump, his campaign and his allies to overturn Joe Bidens victory in Georgia, according to a brief filed Friday in Fulton County Superior Court by defense attorney Kimberly Bourroughs Debrow.

Willis has said that the meeting of Trumps electors on Dec. 14, 2020, despite Republican Gov. Brian Kemps certification of Bidens win, is a key target of her investigation, along with Trumps phone calls to multiple state officials and his campaigns potential involvement in an unauthorized breach of election equipment in rural Coffee County, Ga.

Georgia was among seven states where the Trump campaign and local GOP officials arranged for alternate electors to convene with the stated purpose of preserving legal recourse while election challenges made their way through the courts. Among the questions both Willis and federal investigators have explored is whether the appointment of alternate electors and the creation of elector certificates broke the law. Another question is whether Trump campaign officials and allies initiated the strategy as part of a larger effort to overturn Bidens overall victory during the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021.

The news that some but likely not all of the electors will not be charged raises new questions about the scope of Williss examination of the meeting of electors, all of whom she had previously identified as criminal targets in her investigation. The electors who accepted immunity did so without any promise that they would offer incriminating evidence in return, and they all have stated that they remain unified in their innocence and are not aware of any criminal activity among any of the electors, Debrow said.

In telling the truth they continue to say they have done nothing wrong and they are not aware of anyone else doing anything wrong, much less criminal, said an individual familiar with the investigation who requested anonymity to discuss the case.

Among the electors who appear to remain targets are David Shafer, the chairman of the Georgia Republican Party who presided over the gathering, and Shawn Still, a state senator who at the time was state finance chair for the party and who told congressional investigators he played a role confirming electors identities and admitting them into the room at the Georgia Capitol where they convened.

None of the electors responded to efforts by The Washington Post to reach them. Shafer has denied that convening to cast electoral votes for Trump was improper, saying repeatedly including during the gathering itself that the electors were meeting on a contingency basis to preserve Trumps legal remedy in the event that he prevailed in an ongoing lawsuit challenging the Georgia result.

Under federal law, electors for the winning presidential candidate in each of the states must meet on the first Monday after the second Wednesday of December to cast their votes. The Republican electors said that if they had not met and voted, and if Trump had prevailed in his lawsuit, Bidens electoral votes would have been invalidated but there would have been no Trump votes to replace them.

Fridays filing was the latest in an escalating back and forth between prosecutors and attorneys for the Republicans electors, who have traded allegations of unethical conduct since last summer.

In the latest volley, Debrow accused prosecutors of misrepresenting the facts a reference to an April 18 motion from Willis asking a judge to block Debrow from any further participation in the case, claiming the attorney did not tell her clients they had been offered potential immunity in the investigation.

That motion also claimed Debrow had committed an ethical breach by representing so many clients simultaneously, including some that prosecutors said had incriminated others that Debrow represents in interviews with prosecutors conducted last month. Willis argued that was a conflict of interest.

In her response Friday, Debrow vehemently denied both allegations and accused prosecutors of knowing that their allegations were not true. She cited a letter to her clients dated last August that laid out early discussions of potential immunity offers. She also said that all eight of her current clients have accepted immunity, making it impossible for them to implicate each other. She added that after reviewing audio recordings and transcripts of her clients interviews with prosecutors, which she attended, she has found no evidence that any of them implicated anyone else.

This statement is categorically false, and provably so, Debrow wrote. None of the interviewed electors said anything in any of their interviews that was incriminating to themselves or anyone else, and certainly not to any other elector represented by defense counsel.

She added that Williss motion was reckless, frivolous, offensive, and completely without merit and she asked court to impose sanctions on prosecutors in the form of payment of the cost of responding to the motion.

Debrow also accused Nathan Wade, a special prosecutor in the case, of attempting to mislead at least three of her clients by asking confusing questions about when they had first been presented with offers of immunity.

Debrow claimed in the filing that when she sought to clarify Wades questions about immunity during an interview with one of her clients, identified in the filing as Elector E, Wade ordered a prosecution investigator in the room to shut off a recording device before engaging in what she described as overt threats and attempted intimidation against both her and her client.

According to the filing, the exchange was captured on Debrows tape recorder, which continued to run.

Heres the deal. Heres the deal, Wade allegedly said, according to a partial transcript included in Debrows filing. Either [Elector E] is going to get this immunity, and hes going to answer the questions and talk (inaudible) wants to talk or or were going to leave. And if we leave, were ripping up his immunity agreement, and he can be on the indictment. Thats what can happen.

A spokesman for Williss office declined to comment.

The dispute touches on a key uncertainty about Williss investigation, which is exactly what crimes she and her team believe may have been committed. In her April 18 filing, Willis indicated her belief that some electors, but not all of them, broke the law. Those who planned and helped manage the elector meeting including Shafer and Still appear still to be targets.

During these interviews, some of the electors stated that another elector represented by Ms. Debrow committed acts that are violations of Georgia law and that they were not party to these additional acts, Williss filing said.

According to two individuals with knowledge of the elector interviews with prosecutors, many of the questions centered around Stills role restricting admission to the room in the state Capitol, and also around who mailed the signed electoral certificates to Washington. Debrow made clear in her response Friday she does not believe either action broke any law.

In testimony last year to the U.S. House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, Still said he had been asked to verify electors identities before admitting them to the room. The meeting itself was open to the public and the press and was reported, with video, that day.

The legal back and forth comes just days after Willis said in letters to state and local law enforcement that she expects to announce a charging decision in the case between July 11 and Sept. 1 and urged a need for heightened security and preparedness in coming months due to this pending announcement.

The letters were the strongest indication yet that Willis may file criminal charges in the high-profile case, which not only has cast scrutiny on the actions of Trump and his closest allies but also has ensnared a litany of prominent Republicans, including former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham, R-S.C.

The fireworks between Willis and defense lawyers began last summer, when she first sought electors testimony before a special purpose grand jury convened to investigate alleged election interference in Georgia.

In July, Debrow and Holly Pierson, her then-co counsel, asked a judge to quash those subpoenas, revealing their clients had been informed they were targets of the investigation after some electors, including Shafer, had already voluntarily spoken to prosecutors.

They accused Willis of improper politicization of the case and later asked for her office to be blocked from investigating their clients requests that Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, who oversaw the special grand jury, denied.

In October, Willis sought to disqualify Pierson and Debrow from the case, claiming it was unethical and a conflict of interest for them to represent so many clients simultaneously.

Pierson and Debrow have strongly denied a conflict. In a November filing, they said even if a judge were to determine there was a conflict, their clients had been fully apprised of the necessary information to make an informed choice to waive any such conflicts and remain in the joint representation.

They insisted their clients were innocent of any crimes and pointed to the 1960 presidential election in Hawaii, when Democrats created an alternate slate of electors while the state conducted a recount. The recount flipped the outcome in the state from Richard M. Nixon to John F. Kennedy, and Congress ultimately accepted the Democratic electors votes, which could not have occurred had they not convened and voted in December.

McBurney later ordered Pierson and Debrow to split up their 11 clients ruling that Shafer was substantively differently situated than the other 10 GOP electors jointly represented by attorneys.

He is not just another alternate elector; his lawyers repeated incantation of the lawfulness of the 2020 alternate electoral scheme and invocation of a separate electoral process from 60 years ago and 4,500 miles away do not apply to the additional post-election actions in which Shafer engaged that distinguish him from the ten individuals with whom he shares counsel, McBurney wrote. His fate with the special purpose grand jury (and beyond) is not tethered to the other ten electors in the same manner in which those ten find themselves connected.

Pierson remained with Shafer, while Debrow took on the other 10 clients. Last week Cathy Latham, one of Debrows clients, indicated she had retained a new attorney in the case.

Latham, a former chairwoman of the Republican Party in Coffee County, Ga., has drawn scrutiny for her role as an alternate elector but also for her alleged involvement helping Trump allies copy sensitive election data information from voting machines in the county.

On April 28, Kieran Shanahan, a North Carolina attorney, gave notice that he was representing Latham in the case and filed a motion joining Trumps attorneys in their recent request to remove Willis from the case and block evidence gathered as part of the special grand jury from being used any future legal proceedings.

Shanahan did not respond to a request for comment.

Another elector formerly represented by Debrow is also seeking a new attorney, according to Fridays filing, but it did not say which one. That leaves Debrow with eight electors as clients, all of whom have immunity.

On Monday, McBurney gave Willis and her team until May 15 to respond to the Trump motion, which also claims Willis violated prosecutorial standards and Trumps constitutional rights in part by publicly commenting on the case.

Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this report.

Invalid username/password.

Please check your email to confirm and complete your registration.

Use the form below to reset your password. When you've submitted your account email, we will send an email with a reset code.

Previous

Next

Continue reading here:
At least 8 Republican fake electors agree to immunity in Georgia ... - Press Herald

Weeks after revelations that migrant children are being regularly exploited for cheap labor in the United States prompted bipartisan outrage and calls to action on Capitol Hill, Congress has moved no closer to addressing the issue, which has become mired in a long-running partisan war over immigration policy.

Legislation to crack down on companies use of child labor has gone nowhere and currently has little Republican backing, while Democrats efforts to increase funding for federal agencies to provide more support services to migrant children who cross the border by themselves face long odds in the House, where the G.O.P. has pledged to slash agency budgets.

At the time, Republican proposals to institute tougher vetting of adults in households sponsoring migrant children and expedite the removal of unaccompanied minors stand little chance of gaining ground in the Democratic-led Senate.

Instead, as Congress prepares to wade into a bitter debate over immigration policy in the coming days, Republicans and Democrats have retreated to their opposite corners, abandoning whatever initial hope there may have been for tackling the issue of child labor in a bipartisan way.

Republicans have pointed to exploitative conditions at companies employing migrant children, documented in an investigation by The New York Times, to justify a hard-line immigration package. The Times reported in February that as the number of children crossing the southern border alone has soared to record levels, many have taken on dangerous jobs that violate longstanding labor laws, including in factories, slaughterhouses and at construction sites.

The G.O.P.s legislation, headed for a House vote this week, would restore a series of stringent policies championed under the Trump administration, including measures to hold migrant children in detention centers and expedite their deportation.

Democrats, desperate to avoid any appearance of aiding Republicans in their fight against Mr. Bidens immigration policies, have quieted their criticism of the governments handling of the situation, instead directing their anger at the companies that employ migrant children.

The result is that the political space is vanishing for any consensus in Congress on a policy solution to help protect these children from exploitation.

I know its complicated, but this really needs to be about protecting kids, and not about the bigger politics of the border," Janet Murgua, president of the Latino civil rights advocacy organization UnidosUS, said in an interview, accusing Republicans of playing politics and Democrats of being skittish in confronting the problem. Its a no-brainer. It should be easy to find bipartisan support on this.

The Biden administration has taken steps to change some of its policies and practices since The Times revealed the explosion in child migrant labor. The Health and Human Services Department, which is responsible for placing unaccompanied migrant children in the care of trustworthy adults, has designated a team to support children after they leave government shelters, and is providing more children with case management and legal services. The departments inspector general is also conducting an evaluation of the vetting system used to place migrant children in homes.

The Labor Department has begun several initiatives to enhance its enforcement of child labor laws, and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas said last month that his department was adding a new mission to address crimes of exploitation, including a focus on migrant child labor victims.

Still, there is little sign of meaningful momentum to enact legislation that could stop the exploitation of child migrants as workers. In the opening throes of lawmakers outrage, Republicans and Democrats alike spoke out angrily about the issue, taking the Biden administration to task. Leading members of both parties sent rounds of letters to Cabinet secretaries demanding to know how unaccompanied minors ended up filling dangerous jobs on grueling factory shifts. Rank-and-file lawmakers drafted bipartisan legislation to raise fines against companies violating child labor laws.

But by the time Congress held its first oversight hearings on the issue last month, the subject had been subsumed into a looming fight in the House over a border security bill, and a ramped-up Republican campaign to impeach Mr. Mayorkas over the state of the southern border.

Even in a series of hearings organized expressly to address the trend of migrant child labor, Republicans have used the topic to condemn the Biden administrations overall immigration policies.

This is a crisis made worse by President Bidens open-border agenda, Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Washington Republican and the chairwoman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, said last month during an oversight hearing with the inspector general of the Health and Human Services Department.

At a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing, Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, berated Mr. Mayorkas on the issue, suggesting it should cost him his job.

You have at every stage facilitated this modern-day indentured servitude of children, Mr. Hawley yelled. Why should you not be impeached for this?

At the same time, Democrats have tempered their criticism of the Biden administration for the crisis, even as some of them have continued to declare the governments handling of the matter unacceptable. They have reserved their toughest words for Republicans, whose proposed policies they argue would worsen a humanitarian crisis.

It is hard to take seriously the party that boasts of its concerns for exploited children while simultaneously stripping vital protections from unaccompanied children, Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said during the recent hearing.

He defended the administrations handling of the matter, including its vetting of sponsors.

Despite the fact that there have been some pretty heartbreaking stories of sponsors being traffickers or using the children to work, its my understanding that this past fiscal year over 85 percent of sponsors are close family members, Mr. Nadler said during a recent Judiciary subcommittee hearing on migrant child labor.

These relatives are often uncles or cousins who the arriving children hardly know, and some of them push the minors to work hazardous jobs, The Times found in its reporting.

In the Senate, Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said last week that he was working to bring in senior officials to testify about migrant child exploitation. Mr. Durbin was one of the first Democrats to send letters to the Departments of Labor and Health and Human Services, demanding to know what steps were being taken to protect children from the conditions laid out in the Timess reporting.

But some Democrats say that their party has been too timid in confronting the Biden administration on the crisis.

What we see is Republicans not wanting to hold Republican administrations to account, and Democrats not wanting to hold Democratic administrations to account, Representative Katie Porter, a California Democrat, said in an interview.

Several Democrats have sent letters to the companies named in the Times investigation, asking them what steps they have taken to ensure they do not employ minors going forward. A group of a dozen major institutional investors, including state officials from New York, Connecticut and Maine, sent their own letters, and New Mexicos treasurer placed several of the companies on a list barring future investments. Ford said it wouldrequire staffing agencies to provide better age verification, and Ben & Jerrys, which is facing a class-action lawsuit over the presence of young workers in its supply chain, pledged to suspend dairy farms that use child labor.

Other Democrats have held their public fire, as the companies pressure lawmakers to give them more time.

In March, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus drafted letters to send to the chief executives of companies implicated in the use of child labor, in which they said each corporation must take necessary measures to remove child labor throughout its supply chain and requested briefings, according to a draft shared with The New York Times. The group informed the White House that the letters were coming.

But the effort stalled as companies including PepsiCo and General Motors lobbied members of the caucus to hold off, according to two people familiar with the initiative.

The letters were never sent.

At the same time, the two parties have pursued divergent legislative paths. In late March, Representatives Hillary Scholten of Michigan, a Democrat, and Nancy Mace of South Carolina, a Republican, joined forces on a bill to increase civil penalties for individual child labor law infractions almost tenfold from their current caps ofabout $15,000 per routine violation. It mirrored a measure introduced several weeks earlier by Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii.

But since then, House Democrats have rallied around a more aggressive proposal from Representative Dan Kildee, a Michigan Democrat, that would set the maximum civil payouts even higher, and establish new criminal liabilities for companies that repeatedly flout child labor laws. Democrats in the House and the Senate have also introduced legislation to deny Agriculture Department contracts to companies that commit egregious violations of labor laws, including exploiting children, whether directly or through subcontractors. No House Republicans other than Ms. Mace have signed on to the measures.

Republicans have only just begun to propose similar legislative changes. On Wednesday, Mr. Hawley introduced a measure that would impose fines of up to $100 million against violators of labor laws and $500 million against willful violators, but only for the largest corporations those that do at least half a billion dollars in business annually.

Many other Republicans argue that going after companies is simply not a priority.

Im fine thinking about that, but at the end of the day, stop the magnet, said Representative Chip Roy of Texas, a chief architect of his partys strict border security bill, arguing that policies allowing migrant children to enter the United States were the main reason children were being put to work.

When it comes to companies exploiting children, he added, Im pretty sure thats already against the law.

Originally posted here:
Migrant Child Labor Debate in Congress Becomes Mired in ... - The New York Times

House Republicans are floating investigating the Department of Veterans Affairs or cutting its communications budget as they fume about the Biden administration's messaging on the House GOP's debt limit proposal.

The potential reprisals were suggested by a couple of lawmakers during a press call over the weekend hosted by the No. 3 House Republican, Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., in which Republicans insisted the debt limit and spending cut bill they recently passed would not result in reductions to veterans health care and benefits, contrary to recent VA warnings.

"Obviously, they have too much money in the communications department if they're spending it on political purposes," Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., said in suggesting cuts to the VA's press office.

Read Next: 'Ambushed': Former Marine Is Latest Veteran Killed in Ukraine War

At issue is a bill passed by House Republicans last week that would raise what's known as the debt ceiling in exchange for placing a cap on the overall amount of money the government can spend. The bill does not specifically mandate cuts to the VA or any other department, but it also does not specifically protect any department. Instead, lawmakers would determine later which agencies would take cuts and which ones wouldn't during the annual appropriations process.

While some congressional Republicans have vowed to protect the Pentagon from budget cuts as part of the debt ceiling fight, the Biden administration has issued warnings based on the assumption that every other federal department would face a 22% cut in order to meet the cap in the GOP bill.

Ahead of the House vote on the bill, the VA said that a 22% cut would mean being able to handle 30 million fewer outpatient visits than planned, eliminating 81,000 Veterans Health Administration jobs and 6,000 Veterans Benefits Administration jobs, and increasing the disability claims backlog by an estimated 134,000 claims.

The VA warning, along with subsequent statements from congressional Democrats and the White House framing the cuts as written into the GOP bill, infuriated Republicans. On the weekend press call, Stefanik accused the Biden administration of "shamelessly lying" about the contents of the bill.

Citing federal laws against government officials making false statements, Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., also said that "we need to investigate this."

"It is nothing more than a fear tactic," Clyde continued. "When the Democrats don't have the facts on their side, they use lies, emotion and volume. President Biden is abusing veterans once again, and I think Congress should investigate this."

In response to the latest GOP defenses of their bill, the White House issued a statement Tuesday accusing Republicans of wanting to "hollow out" the VA.

"Unless moderates are willing to stand up to the extreme MAGA groups that have taken over the conference, the House GOP is going to define themselves as so indentured to multinational corporations and billionaires that they're willing to make the biggest cuts to veterans benefits in American history," White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in the statement, using the abbreviation for former President Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan.

The political posturing comes as the Treasury Department warned Monday that the U.S. could hit the debt ceiling as soon as June 1, bumping up its previous estimate of defaulting on U.S. debts from somewhere between July and September. The debt ceiling or limit is the amount of money the Treasury Department can borrow in order to pay for spending Congress has already approved through the annual appropriations process. Economists and administration officials have warned that an unprecedented default could cripple the American economy by reducing faith in U.S. credit and increasing interest rates.

Under the House GOP plan, the debt ceiling would be raised by $1.5 trillion or to March 31, 2024 -- whichever comes first. In exchange, discretionary spending in 2024 would be capped at 2022 levels, which is about $130 billion less than this year's spending level. Spending growth over the next decade would also be capped at 1%.

While it would be possible to meet the cap without cutting either the Pentagon, which makes up about half of the discretionary budget, or the VA, which represents more than one-sixth of the non-defense discretionary budget, doing so would require steep cuts to other government agencies that Democrats are not likely to agree to. Left-leaning think tanks have estimated protecting both Pentagon and VA spending would mean more than 30% cuts to everything else.

The bill is dead on arrival in the Democratic-controlled Senate, but House Republicans view the measure as their opening offer in debt ceiling talks. After the Treasury's announcement Monday, the White House said President Joe Biden invited congressional leaders to a meeting next week. The White House has said that it will not negotiate a budget deal tied to the debt ceiling, which it insists should be raised without other stipulations.

Asked Thursday about GOP complaints that the VA's warnings about the effects of the bill were fearmongering and lies, VA Secretary Denis McDonough maintained he had not seen the Republican criticism but said that "if there's something for me to say to my Republican colleagues on the Hill, I'll say that to them personally."

"A fair reading of that [bill] would suggest that we, as we prepare for the provision of care in the next year, be ready for the full range of options, the full range of outcomes," McDonough said at his monthly press conference, while incorrectly asserting the GOP bill includes a carveout for the Defense Department. "And that's what we're doing."

On the House Republican press call over the weekend, House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Mike Bost, R-Ill., said he spoke with McDonough on Sunday morning. Bost said he told McDonough that he was "disappointed" but that "the conversation didn't go much past that."

"No veteran will lose benefits," Bost vowed. "In my nine years as a member of Congress, I have never seen the use of an agency that is so vitally important to so many people be used as a political hammer to deliver a message that is false so that it would stir people up to cause our veterans to be used as pawns."

-- Rebecca Kheel can be reached at rebecca.kheel@military.com. Follow her on Twitter @reporterkheel.

Related: Veterans Health Care and Benefits Become Flash Points in Debate over Debt Ceiling and Spending Cuts

More:
House Republican Threatens to Cut VA Budget over Agency's Warnings About Budget Cuts - Military.com

One of the great reminders for many Americans during the course of Donald Trumps two presidential elections was how little the popular vote matters for the White House. Although Trump fell short nationally by 3 million votes in 2016 and 7 million votes in 2020, both elections were breathtakingly close due to the vagaries of the Electoral College. Yet, for as obscure as the Electoral College can seem to some voters, the process by which major party presidential candidates are nominated is far more obscure.

So far, the 2024 Republican presidential primary has captured obsessive media coverage, with Trump recently extending his lead in the polls over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is expected to announce a run for president soon. But the actual mechanics over how one becomes the Republican nominee have been overlooked. Like a Rube Goldberg machine, determining the Republican candidate for president is a detailed and elaborate process with hundreds of moving parts designed to eventually produce a nominee at the Republican convention in Milwaukee in the summer of 2024.

A presidential primary often follows a well-known script: A broad field of candidates battle it out in early states like Iowa and New Hampshire, which winnow down the hopefuls to a handful before one candidate finally gains overwhelming momentum on Super Tuesday and eventually is heralded as the presumptive nominee. Along the way, candidates amass delegates state by state. In theory, those delegates will support their respective candidates at the partys convention, where nominees are officially crowned.

But it doesnt always come together that neatly. Presidential campaigns also have to be prepared for the nomination to be decided at the convention if no clear winner emerges from the primaries, and to take steps to ensure they have the support of a majority of the delegates there. These sorts of convention battles were once a fixture of American politics, although they have become uncommon in the modern era of presidential primaries. Most recently for Republicans, unelected incumbent Gerald Ford went into the 1976 convention without a majority of the delegates and only clinched the nomination on the convention floor.

Delegate wrangling is not a process that can wait until the last minute, though. It requires months, if not years, of work to build an operation that combines political outreach to party leaders, grassroots local organizing and a savvy legal team to be successful. Campaigns need to ensure not only that they have enough delegates pledged to them to win the nomination, but that those delegates will be loyal as well.

Unlike the Electoral College, primary rules arent set in stone in the Constitution, nor are delegates invariably hand-selected party loyalists as electors are in general elections. Instead, the process is far more mutable and subject to gamesmanship and alteration through state laws and party rules. These details dont always matter.

But, in a close, heavily contested campaign, like that potentially between Trump and DeSantis in 2024, a delegate operation can make all the difference.

Fifty-six jurisdictions send delegations to the Republican National Convention all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and five territories and all of them have different rules for how the process works. There are broad parameters set nationally by the Republican National Committee, but outside of that, its a free-for-all where each state can make its own rules.

The result is a cornucopia of contests. States can hold conventions, caucuses, or primaries. Some states are winner-take-all primaries, meaning that the candidate who receives a plurality of the votes gets all the delegates; some are proportional, meaning that delegates are awarded in proportion to what percentage of the vote each candidate receives; and some are mixed, with elements of both. In some states, candidates have to hand-pick and recruit delegates to stand on a ballot as their supporters. In others, the delegates are chosen in entirely different contests, elected by activists, and then assigned to the presidential candidates who emerge from the states primary.

The rules of the Republican presidential primary stand in stark contrast to the much more standardized process among Democrats, where all states are mandated to have proportional contests and are barred from winner-take-all races. Democratic delegates, which are awarded both by congressional district and statewide, are apportioned via a simple formula. If a candidate gets at least 15 percent of the vote in a congressional district, they receive delegates from that district, which are distributed proportionately among all the candidates who broke the 15 percent threshold. It works the same way for those delegates apportioned statewide.

The far less standardized Republican process means that campaigns can have much more influence on how the rules are written. Unlike the one-size-fits-all Democratic process, states can reconfigure their rules every cycle, and it gives opportunities for operatives to try to adjust them as needed.

In advance of the 2020 cycle, the Republican primary rules were changed extensively when the Trump campaign and the RNC worked state by state to make it tougher for gadfly candidates to challenge Trumps nomination. In a number of states, the threshold needed for candidates to earn delegates was significantly increased. For example, in Massachusetts in 2016, a candidate only needed to win 5 percent of the vote statewide in order to earn delegates. But in 2020, this threshold was raised to 20 percent and a winner-take-all trigger was added. Coincidentally, the states former Republican governor Bill Weld was mounting a long-shot challenge to Trump, and its incumbent moderate governor Charlie Baker had been a vocal Trump critic. Needless to say, this meant Trump won all of the Bay States delegates as a result.

At this point, it is a bit difficult to forecast precisely what level of tinkering with state primary rules is ideal for a particular candidate, especially when the primary is so unsettled. The frontrunner is Trump, a former president who is facing indictment for paying off a porn star and has the potential to face criminal charges in multiple other jurisdictions as well. This is not a scenario anyone has seen before. Normally, candidates capable of making this type of investment early in a delegate operation are coming from traditional factions of the party, be they establishment, movement conservative, or even part of the GOPs libertarian cadre.

Further, the rules for the Republican primary are in the process of being set in the coming weeks and months. Although states have until October 1 to formally submit their delegate selection plans to the RNC, most of them will not wait until the last minute. This means that if campaigns arent active now and putting in the necessary resources to have influence, the state rules will be set without them.

The current state of affairs greatly benefits the Trump campaign, which is the only one with a full-fledged operation at this point. This is one area where the former president has the benefits of incumbency. Its not just that he has run two presidential campaigns, but that there was an entire White House political operation for four years that worked to court party activists and keep Trump in their good graces. Even with a DeSantis-aligned super PAC coming to life in recent weeks, the governors nascent operation still leaves him at a disadvantage.

Before building a delegate operation, the first challenge is qualifying for the presidential primary ballot. While in some states, the state GOP needs to simply recognize that a candidate is running a bona fide campaign or there is a nominal filing fee, others require intensive effort and labor for a candidate to have their name on a primary ballot particularly at inopportune times. There are states, like Virginia and Indiana, that are notorious for their strenuous requirements for candidates to petition their way on the ballot, in both statewide and congressional districts.

These tests are important not just for their own sake, but also as a test of basic capacity. In 2012, only Mitt Romney and Ron Paul appeared on the Republican ballot in Virginia, which eased Romneys path in a key Super Tuesday primary. If a campaign cant qualify for the ballot in Indiana while wooing voters in Iowa, its not a good sign.

One of the early signs of organizational weakness from Jeb Bushs 2016 presidential campaign was when it lagged on submitting the necessary paperwork for delegates in Alabama the year prior. Whereas a number of other campaigns filed candidates to fill all of the states 47 elected positions, Bush only was able to find enough supporters to fill a mere 29 of the delegate vacancies.

Other states require delegates and alternates to be filed long in advance from each congressional district they seek to represent. In the era of heavily partisan gerrymandering, this means that campaigns have to work to find sufficient supporters in deep blue areas easier said than done. As Andrew Boucher, a veteran Republican consultant, told Vox, Campaigns need to be ramping up on the political side right now, because some of these deadlines come fast. Who are your supporters in Ohios D+28 11th Congressional District in Cleveland?

But the process of finding those delegates, even in Democratic strongholds, is not just important to ensure that campaigns can adequately fill out their designated slots on the ballot. Instead, its because the two-pronged process in many states separates the selection of delegates from delegate allocation, which means the process of candidates winning delegates is separate from the promise of determining who those delegates are. Delegate selection is about determining who will be a delegate and is chosen to go to the national convention. Delegate allocation is simply about which campaign they are credited for on primary night after the votes are counted. The distinction between the two is often academic. In all states, delegates have to vote for the candidate they are pledged for on the first ballot.

But for anything else up for a vote at the convention, they are otherwise free agents. Theoretically, they can even vote to change the rules to unbind themselves on the convention floor. In states like North Carolina and Georgia, delegates are elected at congressional district elections and the presidential primary merely serves to decide who they are pledged to cast their votes for on the convention floor.

This means the campaigns have to keep an eye on the delegate process at countless state contests. The risk is that they could win a states delegates and still end up with people who could potentially defect at a convention. This is not an issue in a blowout, but it always looms over the political battlefield in a close primary race. In 2016, delegates opposed to Trumps nomination were eager to take advantage of this in order to force a second ballot and eventually keep Trump from being the nominee. After all, the convention floor was packed with party regulars who had no time for a crude New York real estate developer with a questionable commitment to social conservatism.

But Republicans narrowly avoided chaos. A motion to force a full fight on the floor of the convention in 2016 fell just short. At the time, the motion required the majority of eight delegations to sign their name to a document stating their support to put Ted Cruzs name in nomination as an alternative to Trump. Although the eight-delegation benchmark was initially reached, backroom dealings and pressure led to various Republicans removing their names, and eventually, there was no rival for Trump on the convention floor. Since then, the threshold for placing a candidate into nomination at the convention has been lowered to a plurality of five delegations.

The question is how much any of this will matter in 2024. The formal ballot to determine the nominee on the convention floor has long been pro forma. No Republican convention has formally hit a second ballot since 1948, when Thomas Dewey won after three ballots, and no Republican convention has even started with the results uncertain since 1976, when unelected incumbent Gerald Ford edged out former California Gov. Ronald Reagan.

In the end, campaigns are about priorities. There is only a finite amount of time, a finite amount of money, and a finite amount of resources available. And for a long-shot candidate, investing in delegate fights and doing the blocking and tackling to ensure ballot access in states that hold late primaries may not be worth it. After all, an extra visit to a single Pizza Ranch in Iowa might be worth a thousand congressional district conventions for an underdog on the eve of the caucuses.

However, delegate operations still matter. Rick Santorums 2012 campaign was hurt by the fact that it was so resource-starved that it was difficult for it to fully take advantage of any momentum from its surprise performance in Iowa. And the investments made by Ted Cruzs campaign early in the 2016 cycle made it that much more difficult for Trump to lock down the nomination.

For Trump and DeSantis, it is not likely that they will be scrimping for money or media attention in the weeks before the first nominating contest. But building up a delegates operation still matters for them not just for a potential convention fight, but to demonstrate their strength and viability before the first votes are cast. Voters and donors want to back a winner, and a robust national campaign demonstrates the ability to win not only the nomination but potentially the general election as well.

In a world where so much is about the vagaries of the news cycle, delegate wrangling is one of the few aspects of politics that is entirely in control of campaigns and almost entirely invisible to the public. It is about organization and effort. It forces campaigns to either display a certain fundraising prowess that enables them to muscle through these challenges or demonstrate the grassroots support needed to do so on the cheap. There are no shortcuts to it.

And if things get weird, next summer, in an arena in Milwaukee heated by lights from a thousand television cameras and packed with thousands of party loyalists battling a lack of sleep and a surplus of hangovers, it could determine who becomes the Republican nominee against Joe Biden.

Read the original here:
How the Republican presidential primary really works - Vox.com