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In a push designed to treat unvaccinated Americans like an oppressed group, Republicans are reportedly pursuing a series of bills that would make it illegal to discriminate against those who choose not to get the COVID-19 vaccine. At least one stateMontanahas already signed such a bill into law, and according to Axios, others around the country are following suit.

Montanas law prevents businesses such as grocery stores and restaurants from refusing customers based on their vaccination status. And employers in the state cannot consider an applicants vaccination status when making hiring decisions. In a similar move, Alabama passed a law prohibiting schools and universities from mandating COVID vaccine requirements for students, faculty, and staff, while other government institutions and private companies are also barred from stopping service to unvaccinated patrons. In essence, these types of laws give the same protection to unvaccinated Americans as those who face discrimination based on their race, religion, sexual orientation, and gender identity. When we think about the normaldiscrimination statuteswe have protected classes based on something that is sort of inherent to you, Lowell Pearson, a managing partner at Husch Blackwell, told Axios. But vaccination status you certainly can control.

In several states, Republican governors have passed mandates banning the use of vaccine passports, meaning businesses and venues cannot ask for proof that their customers are vaccinated.Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Idaho, Iowa, Montana, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming all have vaccine-passport bans.

Ironically, many of these efforts are taking place as the more contagious delta variant continues to spread, in states where vaccination rates are already at rock bottom. In Montana, approximately 43% of the states population is fully vaccinated. Around one third of Alabama residents have been fully vaccinated, and the state is currently experiencing an increase in COVID cases, according to The New York Times. Last week, CDC director Rochelle Walensky made it clear that those Americans who have recently died after contracting COVID-19 were unvaccinated. Preliminary data from several states over the last few months suggest that 99.5% of deaths from COVID-19 in the United States were in unvaccinated people, she said in a press briefing.

Despite the obvious danger, right-wing pundits with vast megaphones have continued to discourage their audiences from getting vaccinated. Last week Charlie Kirk,the cofounder of pro-Trump youth group Turning Point USA, launched a No Forced Vax campaign on Tucker Carlson Tonight, promising to fight back against forced campus vaccinations and supposedly launching chapters on campuses across the country. Kirk has compared vaccine requirements to South African apartheid, and GOP Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has likened mask mandates and the treatment of unvaccinated Americans to that of Jews in prewar Nazi Germany. In condemning Joe Bidens door-knocking campaign to get more Americans vaccinated, Tucker Carlson called it the greatest scandal he has ever witnessed, and his colleague Laura Ingraham slammed it as creepy.

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Republicans Want to Protect Your Right to Die to Own the Libs - Vanity Fair

The first day of the Texas Legislature's special session began last week at the Capitol in Austin. Republicans, who control the state, are attempting to pass new voting laws that will add penalties and make it more difficult to cast a ballot. Tamir Kalifa/Getty Images hide caption

The first day of the Texas Legislature's special session began last week at the Capitol in Austin. Republicans, who control the state, are attempting to pass new voting laws that will add penalties and make it more difficult to cast a ballot.

Texas Republicans introduced another set of sweeping bills that voting rights advocates say could make it harder to vote in a state that already has some of the most restrictive election laws in the country. Democrats left the state on Tuesday in a second effort to block the legislation from moving forward.

The bills House Bill 3 and Senate Bill 1 were filed during the special legislative session called by Gov. Greg Abbott, which started last week. Republican leaders vowed to take another pass at approving voting legislation after Texas House Democrats blocked a previous effort in May to pass more voting restrictions.

HB 3 and SB 1, however, do not include some of the more controversial measures that were added to that previous bill in the final hours of the legislative session in May. Those included a provision that would have restricted voting on Sundays as well as a measure that would have allowed election officials to overturn election results if there are voter fraud allegations.

The bills are part of a nationwide effort by state-level Republicans to enact more restrictive voting laws following former President Donald Trump's loss in the 2020 election. Trump and his allies have falsely claimed that the election was stolen. Twenty-eight restrictive voting laws in 17 states have been enacted since January, according to the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice.

The latest bills in Texas include new identification requirements for people voting by mail and prohibit local election officials from sending a vote-by-mail application to someone who hasn't requested one.

They also ban drive-through voting and extended hours during early voting. Republicans in the state argue that these innovations which were mostly used by Houston officials during the pandemic opened the door to voter fraud.

James Slattery, a senior staff attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, said voters of color and shift workers benefited the most from these methods of voting last year.

"And so you can consider the bans on those forms of voting to be a direct attack on voters of color in particular," he said.

In addition, the bills expand what partisan poll watchers can observe during elections and prohibits poll watchers from being removed for violating election law. If passed, these bills would also create new criminal penalties for any election worker who "intentionally or knowingly refuses to accept a [poll] watcher."

Slattery said these bills basically give a host of new powers to partisan poll watchers.

"Both bills make it harder to control disruptive partisan poll watchers when they are acting aggressively or disrupting voting," he said.

The bills also create a slew of new criminal penalties and requirements for folks who assist voters at the polls, or people who assist others planning to vote by mail.

For example, they require that people fill out paperwork if they are taking someone who is not a relative to vote in person. And they require people to exit a car if there is someone voting curbside in that vehicle.

And while Republicans have backtracked on another provision that would have made it easier to overturn election results, Slattery said these bills kept other parts of that measure.

He said that includes a way for losing candidates to "harass winning candidates in court" through a new election contest process that allows the former to allege various kinds of voter fraud. Slattery said this process could mire the results of an election.

"When you think about it, what this is, this is part of the efforts that we have seen especially in other states after the 2020 election to undermine the legitimacy of election results," he said.

Republicans in Texas have argued that concerns about election integrity are serious and should be addressed, even though they haven't offered evidence of any widespread problem with voting in the state.

State Rep. Travis Clardy, a Republican from Nacogdoches who is a member of the Texas House Elections Committee, told NPR in June that he has "zero doubt about the legitimacy of elections" in the state.

"This is a preventative measure for us," he said. "We do have and heard testimony throughout our session of problems of voter irregularities, of voter fraud, of cases currently being investigated. It is an issue. It is a real thing. But I think it's our job to make sure that doesn't blossom into a problem."

Slattery said the provisions in these bills, however, do nothing to make elections more secure in Texas and would instead further the false claims Trump and his allies have made that the 2020 election was stolen.

"There isn't any election security benefit to nearly any of these provisions," he said. "It's all in service of the big lie and enshrining the big lie even further into the laws of this most restrictive state in the country."

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Texas Republicans Have A New Voting Bill. Here's What's In It - NPR

Donald Trump is still the undisputed leader of the Republican Party. But you probably already knew that. The medley of conservative voters, politicians, activists and political commentators that descended on Dallas this past weekend for this years second Conservative Political Action Conference certainly did.

But some things are less clear. Namely, ahead of the midterm elections, GOP voters seem to be casting about for the best path forward and debating whether their energy would be better utilized by relitigating the results of last years presidential race (again) or chugging forward to whats expected to be a grueling midterm cycle.

This schism amongst Republicans was on display throughout the weekend. Take, for example, a conversation I had with James Scott, a once-reluctant Trump supporter whos now all in. After retrieving a hot coffee on the second day of CPAC, he sheepishly admitted to me that, back in 2016, he held his nose before voting for the now-former president. Standing across from me with a Come and See baseball cap, the bespectacled retiree described his past self as a Marco Rubio aficionado who joined Team Trump only after Trump announced an ultra-conservative Supreme Court shortlist ahead of the 2016 general election. And now, Scott is so devoted that he believes assessing Trumps baseless lies about rampant election fraud is critical to the GOPs future. We must have election integrity, he told me. The truth, he added, must be brought out because the future depends on it.

Compare that, though, to 20-year-old Aaron Genus, a college student, Instagram personality and restaurant worker who came to the conference from Michigan. Genus made clear that he, too, believed the 2020 election was an absolute joke; but unlike Scott, hes ready for the party to move on. In America, theres no such thing as an election do-over, he said. Once Trump got in that helicopter and waved goodbye, it was over. Theres no way to undo what happened. All we can do is fight for our election integrity come the next two cycles.

Heading into CPAC, I was curious where voters heads were at. How preoccupied would attendees be with rehashing 2020 versus looking ahead to 2022? In years past, CPAC has been a useful barometer for the base of the Republican Party and its most fervent activists even if it isnt always indicative of the partys future. This year was no exception, although the choice of whether to press on from the previous election is arguably a new one.

A bevy of speakers decried claims of a stolen election (though they are false), and at least two events were devoted exclusively to how to spot and guard against election fraud. Other panels focused on how to expand the partys base, and ahead of Trumps culminating speech, an emcee declared that 2022 starts right here. What I found, though, is that only a small handful of attendees were actually ready to move on.

After losing the U.S. House in 2018 and the Senate and White House in 2020, Republicans are eager to identify candidates who can help them successfully reclaim Congress in 2022 and the presidency in 2024. But if this weekends CPAC conference is any indication of the partys priorities, some of the staunchest Republicans are more concerned about challenging the last election than winning the next.

I still feel we were so cheated in 2020 and I dont think thats been resolved, attendee Pat DeLange, who turned 63 on Saturday, told me. So when there is cheating involved it needs to be exposed. I think we need to get the rightful president back in office so he can fix this and wake people up.

Trump, for his part, seemed more concerned with the past, too. If nothing else, its one way for him to maintain relevance as the partys de facto leader while he irons out his future plans. During a roughly 90-minute speech on Sunday, he mentioned similar to prior interviews and appearances a rigged election and sarcastically quipped that he lost last years race. (The crowd went wild at these bits, repeatedly booing at claims of fraud.) But perhaps most notably, he continued to tease supporters on whether hell run again. (I will never stop fighting for you, he told a brimming crowd, which chanted back, Four more years!)

On the one hand, considering Trumps grip on the party 53 percent of self-identified Republicans said in a May Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll that they believe he is the true president its not surprising that supporters are still overwhelmingly taking cues from the former president. Recent polls on who won the 2020 election confirm that much of the party isnt over last year, either. In November, roughly three in four Trump supporters said Bidens win was due to voter fraud, per a Monmouth University poll. And those numbers have barely budged. According to that May Reuters/Ipsos survey, 56 percent of Republicans still believe the election was rigged.

Experts I spoke to ahead of the convention said theyve never seen a past president maintain his position as head of a political party as Trump has, but they werent shocked with the crowds obsession with the past either. Its not a real future-oriented crowd. Id say theyre more interested in what they see as [a] fraudulent election and litigating all that, said Robert Saldin, a professor of political science at the University of Montana. But its always been a backwards looking thing. Make America Great Again is casting a tide to the past, so I think, in a way, theres always been a backwards focus there thats been relatively rare in American politics.

Indeed, fealty to Trump (and, by virtue, his false claims of fraud) were a key theme of the weekend. Not only were attendees there wearing a sea of red, white and blue outfits and accessories bearing Trumps face and name, they overwhelmingly selected Trump as their preferred candidate for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination in the CPAC straw poll. He captured 70 percent of the ballots in the anonymous survey a boost from the 55 percent he won in a similar poll at the Orlando CPAC conference in February. Also during the conference, attendees circulated a seven-point plot to reinstate Trump as president in a matter of days. (Theres no constitutional mechanism for reinstating a former president.)

Of course, those who want to leave 2020 behind were at the conference, too, but they were a minority. On the last day of CPAC, I found Grizzly Joe, a Trump supporter who received national attention for telling CNN he believed Biden was the true winner of the November election. (While he had media credentials for the event, he told me he was half there for coverage and half there as an attendee.) Looking in the rearview mirror isnt going to help us move forward, he told me. When I asked him whether theres too much focus right now on debunked claims of fraud, he told me that, some people are like a dog with a bone. If theres fraud lets find it, root it out and fix it. But people jumping up and down bellyaching about Trump being the real president isnt going to put Trump back in the White House.

A second conversation with Barbara Lewis, 65, who wore a Trump 2024 shirt and blue leggings with red and white stars, yielded much of the same sentiment. They fought the [last] election enough, and the fight kind of just needs to end. I dont think they can go any further with the fight.

Its too early to say where the Republican Party will go from here, but at least for now, its clear that Trump and the 2020 election are still very resonant in voters minds. And that makes perfect sense considering Trump himself has a foot in both the past and the future.

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CPAC Emphasized Republicans Obsession With 2020 - FiveThirtyEight

The six-month anniversary of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol prompted somber reflections on one of the darkest moments in recent American history.

But far from creating a moment of regret or reflection, last weeks grim milestone also showed how many Republicans including in Pennsylvania have doubled down on the lies and conspiracies that sparked the insurrection. As former President Donald Trump continues promoting the fantasy of a stolen election, key Pennsylvania Republicans have amplified or nodded toward that fiction, using their loyalty to the lie as a selling point in their bids for higher office.

Calls for a new election review, and casting aspersions on the 2020 results, are now a key element of GOP primaries nationally and in Pennsylvania, where the state has critical elections for governor and U.S. Senate next year. Its also driving Republican pushes for tighter election laws, an effort President Joe Biden hopes to counter Tuesday when he comes to Philadelphia to deliver a speech on voting rights.

Last Wednesday, six months and one day after the Capitol protest he joined turned into a riot, State Sen. Doug Mastriano announced he would try to create a Pennsylvania version of Arizonas widely criticized partisan election review.

Decrying damage to our election process, he said the only way to restore confidence in our Commonwealths election process is to undertake a forensic investigation. Mastriano has spread lies about the election at every turn helping fuel the doubts that now run through much of the GOP.

READ MORE: A key Pa. Republican asks counties to hand over ballots and election equipment for an Arizona-style review

Far from sinking him politically, the Franklin County Republican hopes it will get him a promotion: Hes considered a top GOP contender for governor, and is openly angling for Trumps endorsement.

Also hoping for Trumps support, Lou Barletta, another Republican gubernatorial hopeful who has refused to acknowledge Bidens victory, pointed to his own past calls for an investigation and his campaigns election integrity commission.

And as former U.S. Attorney Bill McSwain prepares to enter the gubernatorial race, he privately wrote to Trump handing the former president more ammunition for his fraud claims and seeking his endorsement.

In the June letter, seven months after the election, McSwain called the way the 2020 election was run a partisan disgrace and said he received various allegations of wrongdoing, but was ordered by then-Attorney General Bill Barr not to make any public statements about them. He wrote that he was told to pass on allegations to state Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat. McSwain then asked for Trumps support and concluded, I hope to see you soon.

Trump blasted out the letter Monday night to bolster his stolen election claims.

McSwain has dodged previous questions about accepting the 2020 results.

With Trump still reigning as the partys most powerful figure, his election grievances have become a litmus test for Republican candidates. Even those who havent questioned the results have felt compelled to support new reviews, despite numerous audits and oversight by bipartisan elections officials, judges, and Trumps own Justice Department that affirmed the election results.

Its a familiar pattern: Republicans are pulled along by Trumps lies, forced to at least humor them until they take hold and become party orthodoxy.

READ MORE: What I saw inside the House chamber as the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol closed in

After Trumps initial claims of massive election fraud fell apart, Republicans have since laundered the idea through complaints about election procedures and now calls for a partisan audit, all of which nod at the original lie: that Trump was robbed. Conspiracy theories thrive on claims that stack on top of each other, said Dustin Carnahan, a Michigan State professor who focuses on misinformation and politics.

Even when you remove any one element of that narrative, the conspiracy still holds together, Carnahan said. Its all just reinforcing this idea that something illegitimate and something inappropriate may have happened in 2020.

Pennsylvania already conducted an audit of a sample of ballots in 63 of its 67 counties, which affirmed the accuracy of the outcome. Counties are also required by law to audit a small sample of ballots.

Still, while few have gone as far as Mastriano or Barletta, several of the most prominent Pennsylvania Republicans running in 2022 have embraced calls for additional reviews of last years presidential vote.

We need a full forensic audit in all the states where we had issues, and Pennsylvania certainly had issues, Republican Senate candidate Jeff Bartos recently said in a May interview with former Trump strategist Steve Bannon.

Another Senate candidate, Sean Parnell, also told Bannon he supports an audit of the 2020 results, as well as in other elections.

When asked by The Inquirer, both offered a rationale tied to business practices.

I come from the private sector we audit things all the time, every day, Bartos said in a statement. Only politicians looking to hide something would object to more integrity and more transparency in elections.

The government can audit American citizens at any time, Parnell, who last year led a failed lawsuit seeking to throw out all of Pennsylvanias 2.6 million mail ballots, said in a statement. Why shouldnt the government be subject to the same standard?

Of course, businesses audits are usually conducted by neutral professionals without a stake in the outcome. Exxon doesnt open its books for a review by Greenpeace.

READ MORE: What Sean Parnell, Liz Cheney, and Rudy Giuliani show about Trumps hold on Pennsylvania Republicans

Carla Sands, Trumps former ambassador to Denmark and now a Senate candidate, pointed to Mastrianos visit to observe Arizonas election review when she told conservative radio host Chris Stigall last week that I believe that they want our election to have integrity and be honest and fair.

Breaking with many in his party, one potential GOP gubernatorial candidate, State Sen. Dan Laughlin (R., Erie), acknowledged that Biden won Pennsylvania and doubted a new investigation would find anything of significance.

If we proceed with the audit, it will continue to perpetuate the story that there was something wrong with the 2020 election results, and I dont think thats in the best interests of Pennsylvania, Laughlin said in an interview.

The Arizona review has been rife with shoddy protocols and handling of ballots, partisan actors, and bizarre tactics including examinations of ballots for bamboo, on the cooked-up suspicion some came from Asia. Neutral observers have struggled for access. Maricopa County, the home of Phoenix and the target of the review, is likely to spend millions replacing its voting machines because of security concerns.

READ MORE: Pennsylvania Republicans have a path to victory in 2022. Pro-Trump candidates may not follow it.

But Democrats and Republicans are both glad to keep the GOP denialism and Trump front-and-center.

A Reuters-Ipsos poll in May suggests why: 56% of Republicans believe the election was rigged, but only 25% of voters overall do. The state Democratic Party and national groups have blasted out a stream of messages tying Republican candidates to election conspiracies.

This is a disgrace to democracy not to mention a profound waste of time and taxpayer money, Gov. Tom Wolf tweeted about Mastrianos effort.

On July 6, inboxes were filled with Democratic fund-raising pitches tied to the riot anniversary.

Every minute Republicans spend competing for Trumps approval is a minute wasted for Pennsylvanians, Shapiro, a Democrat expected to run for governor, said on Twitter.

The latest election review to come up empty was in Michigan, where a Republican-led legislative panel concluded there was no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud. But far from easing doubts, the result last month only brought more attacks from Trump.

Laughlin, the state senator from Erie County, suspected the same outcome would follow in Pennsylvania.

In talking to some of my constituents that are for this, he said, I dont believe that they are going to believe the results of the audit unless it finds what they are hoping for.

Excerpt from:
Supporting Trumps election lies is becoming a litmus test for Pennsylvania Republicans seeking higher office - The Philadelphia Inquirer

Republicans are questioning Amazons relationship with the Pentagon after newly released emails show that defense officials praised tech executives vying for a $10 billion contract during the Trump administration.

On Tuesday, The New York Times reported on previously unreleased emails that show Pentagon officials applauding Amazon executives while the company sought out a lucrative defense contract between 2017 and 2018. The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure project, or JEDI, set out to find a tech company that would move the Defense Departments computer networks over to the cloud.

In one instance, the Times reports that former Trump Defense Secretary Jim Mattis traveled to Silicon Valley to meet with executives from companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google in 2017. During this trip, Mattis was made uncomfortable while Amazon representatives aggressively pitched their cloud-computing products to him. A former Mattis adviser, Sally Donnelly, also referred to Bezos as the genius of our age. Donnelly, who later sent Mattis a list of reasons he should meet with Bezos, had previously worked at a consulting firm where her clients included Amazon.

This is exactly what we were concerned about, and it contradicts Amazons insistence that there is nothing to see here, Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) said in a joint statement Tuesday. Its become more and more clear that Amazon used its market power and paid-for connections to circumvent ethical boundaries and avoid competition in an attempt to win this contract.

Microsoft won the multibillion-dollar contract in 2019 after a closely watched bidding fight between Amazon. In the months leading up to the contracts winner announcement, former President Donald Trump dialed up his criticism of Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos, accusing the Bezos-owned Washington Post of unfair media coverage.

But earlier this month, the Defense Department announced that it would cancel its contract amid an ongoing legal battle alleging that Trump wrongfully interfered in the bidding process. In canceling the prior contract, Amazon is given a second chance to win the $10 billion deal. But Republicans in Washington are calling for the company to testify regarding its Pentagon relationships in light of the newly released emails.

Now, more than ever, we need to ask Amazon, under oath, whether it tried to improperly influence the largest federal contract in history, the lawmakers wrote.

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Republicans call for Amazon to testify on Pentagon relationship - The Verge