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State Sen. Kevin Priola was the most bipartisan lawmaker in Colorado last year, a moderate Republican who sided with Democrats more often than any of his GOP colleagues.

He was the lone Republican senator to support state tracking of greenhouse gas emissions, and the only one to join Democrats in a failed attempt to get voters to forgo constitutionally required tax refunds to generate money for schools and roads.

At the Capitol, Democrats consider the Adams County lawmaker a genuinely good guy, a thoughtful policymaker, and a friend, even.

But this is politics. And at election time, the size of the majority in the state legislature is purely a numbers game.

Thats what puts the most moderate Republican in the Colorado legislature at the center of the most expensive legislative race in the state, one in which dark-money funded super PACs are pouring cash into both sides in a district that can swing either way.

Outside spending on the race exceeds $3.8 million, making it the most expensive legislative race in the state, a Colorado Sun analysis showed. Of that, 44% is going to TV spots, digital ads and mailers opposing Priola. The amount towers over the $49,000 spent by Priolas campaign by mid-October and the $80,000 spent by his Democratic challenger, kindergarten teacher Paula Dickerson.

Priola, 47, has been knocking on doors from morning until sundown, while political newcomer Dickerson is teaching kindergarteners by day and dropping literature on doorsteps on evenings and weekends. At least, she was until she was exposed to COVID-19 by one of her students and went on a two-week quarantine that ends this weekend.

Nasty television ads and mailers funded by a Republican super PAC are highlighting Dickersons two bankruptcies, claiming she isnt fit to spend taxpayer dollars. Democrats are attacking Priolas record on health care and efforts to restrict abortion access. Theyre also calling on Adams Countys old-school, blue-collar party loyalists who may have been turned off by the current, more liberal version of the party to stand behind a school teacher who is married to a roofer.

By all accounts, the race is intense. But for Priola, it doesnt feel that much different than four years ago, when he defeated a Democratic incumbent to take the Senate seat in a race that also ranked as one of the most expensive in the state. The Henderson resident did it by hitting the sidewalks, by knocking the same doors three or four different times until someone opened up to chat. Often, they asked him about his father or his grandfather or the family business, a flower-growing operation called Priola Greenhouses Inc, which the family sold a few years back.

The main goal this time around, though, is to keep Priola from getting swallowed by a blue wave to get voters to see him for him instead of a Republican in a county where a majority voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Adams County is one of the last swing counties left in Colorado, a split of 29.6% Democratic, 27% Republican and 41.5% unaffiliated.

Most candidates get caught up in waves, a red wave or a blue wave, said Priolas campaign manager, Ryan Lynch. But not Kevin, because Kevin actually has relationships with a large number of the voters.

Priola estimates hes talked to more people at their doors than he did four years ago because during the pandemic, people were at home instead of at soccer practice or out for dinner. They were dying to have actual human contact, he said. Its a wealth of people being willing to let me ask them what was on their minds. In the past, I could count on one out of 10. Now its five out of 10 or more.

The senator wears a glove, offers to put on a mask, and stands 10 feet away. Mostly, people want to talk about how overwhelming life is this year from job loss to managing online school from home.

Priola, a real estate developer, tries to separate himself from national politics the same way he politely explains to constituents that the legislature isnt in charge of whether schools are open or that they should call their city officials to complain about local issues. When folks gripe that he is sending them way too much mail, Priola explains that its not actually him, but the political action committees pouring money into the race.

It wasnt me, sorry, he tells them. Its just the nature of the beast.

The fact that state Democrats would rather widen their majority in the Senate than have him around is no surprise to Priola.

Im a big boy. I understand politics, he said. Its a numbers game.

For Dickerson, a political newcomer, the ugliness involved in the race has been a bit shocking. She knew she would have to explain her two bankruptcies, but didnt realize how it would feel to see the attack ads blasting her credit card debt.

Dickerson, 51, said her family dug themselves into credit card debt after years of taking care of her mother, a three-time cancer survivor who lives just down the street in a house that Dickerson inherited from her grandparents. Dickerson and her husband helped her mother with her bills, including copays for medical treatment, and when they had tapped out their funds, she said, they began charging credit cards for food and other necessities.

She is on a payment plan to pay off her debt, and is scheduled to make 100% restitution in 2022, she said.

Priola, Dickerson said, has never had to worry about money and he has never had to make tough decisions.

It definitely feels like there is a lot at stake, that they are fighting really hard to keep his seat, she said. They know this seat can be flipped to blue.

In a story thats become familiar among suburban women, Dickerson said she felt motivated after President Donald Trumps election to get into politics. She felt a sinking feeling after the 2016 election and knew we had a lot of work to do, she said. A kindergarten teacher for 25 years and active in the teachers union, Dickerson enrolled in Emerge, a program that trains Democratic women to run for office.

Her top issues are health care, gun safety and as a teacher who sometimes spends her own money on classroom supplies school funding. She has the support of Moms Demand Action, which fights for tougher laws on gun safety, and the American Federation of Teachers. Dickerson speaks often about the disparity among schools in Adams County, from Commerce City to Brighton and Thornton.

Our schools are not failing, she said, theyre starving.

I know the people of this community, said Dickerson, who lives in Thornton and works for Adams 12 Five Star Schools. Her husband is a roofing specialist for Jefferson County School District. I have taught generations of children in this community. I am your neighbor and your public school teacher.

Dickersons campaign manager, Claire Johnson, is an English language acquisition teacher, helping students understand math and chemistry when English isnt their first language. She said one of the toughest parts of the campaign has been managing their day jobs along with the campaign. From our side as educators, its been pretty tough knowing everything that is happening out of class but still being present for kids and engaged in teaching all day, Johnson said.

Democratic super PACs, including Leading Colorado Forward, have spent $1.93 million on the Adams County race, while Republican counterparts, including Unite for Colorado Action, have spent $1.8 million

Dustin Zvonek, who runs Unite for Colorado Action, said the race is a target because Adams County is shifting. The area was once a Democratic stronghold, but Democratic voters have been soured by what Zvonek called job-killing regulations, particularly in the oil and gas industry. Based on the partisan makeup of the county, a Democrat should have won in 2016, but instead it was Priola.

Democrats are spending big to take out Priola, he said, because they see an opportunity, especially in a year when blue wins are predicted. Democrats are hoping Adams County holds its trend lines favoring them. Since 2014, their margin of victory at the top of the ticket races for governor and U.S. Senate have only grown.

At the end of the day, its partisanship, Zvonek said. The Democrats who control the state Senate today would much rather have another Democrat than Kevin Priola.

Tyler Sandberg, a Republican operative who has run various GOP campaigns, said Republicans can still win in working-class Adams County, a place where old-school Democrats dont fit the Boulder-Denver identity that is increasingly taking over the Democratic Party. The union supporters and blue-collar workers of Senate District 25 dont fit in with the far left-wing of the party that doesnt mind the term Democratic socialist, he said.

If candidates and campaigns matter, then Kevin Priola is the best chance of winning his race, Sandberg said. Hes the hardest working man in show business. He fits the district really well.

Priolas maverick voting record is a selling point to voters, a good fit in a county that is a stew of all types of voters and economic classes, Sandberg said. But in 2020, when even Sandberg is predicting a Republican bloodbath, will it matter?

Is the blue tsunami so powerful that there is nothing he can do? Sandberg asked.

For Democrats, who hold a 19-16 majority in the Senate, taking out Priola is nothing personal, though some of them feel a cognitive dissonance as they square their thinking about dark-money PACs trying to boot out their GOP friend.

But in the end, picking off Priola is just a core factor of the math, Sandberg said.

This is true, Senate Majority Leader Steve Fenberg said.

I like Kevin. We work well with him. I consider him a friend, Fenberg said. But elections, even local ones, rarely happen on an island, and there is no escaping the national conversation in 2020, he said.

Fenberg said he didnt realize Priolas race would end up this hotly contested, but now the Democrats have their sights on increasing its majority. If history is a good indicator, and if there is a Democrat in the White House, the party doesnt expect to fare as well at midterm elections in 2022. The long-game strategy is to increase the majority this year in the hopes of hanging onto it in 2022. State senators serve four-year terms, so this seat wont be in contention in two years.

Its in our interest in trying to run up the scoreboard this year, Fenberg said.

He questions whether GOP attacks on Dickersons personal financial struggles will backfire, especially at a time when many families are coping with job loss and faltering businesses. Fenberg said health care is top of mind during a pandemic, and while President Trump wants to disband the Affordable Care Act, he notes that Priola typically voted with his own party on health care bills. Priola was among several Republicans to vote against the 2019 reinsurance legislation to help health insurers pay some of their highest-cost claims, for example.

Yes, Kevin Priola is the most moderate Republican in the Senate, Fenberg said. I would argue thats a relatively low bar.

Sun correspondent Sandra Fish contributed to this report.

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Why Colorado Democrats are trying to unseat the most bipartisan Republican in the legislature - The Colorado Sun

Even if President Donald Trump retains enough rural strength to hold Texas in next week's election, which many still consider the most likely outcome, the swelling voter turnout in and around the increasingly Democratic-leaning cities of Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio and Fort Worth points toward a return to political competition in the state after more than two decades of almost uninterrupted Republican ascendancy.

Just alone in Harris County, which is centered on Houston, 1.15 million people had voted through Monday evening, compared with 1.3 million total in the 2016 election. The state's other big cities and inner suburban counties are experiencing comparable increases.

"We expected a lot of turnout," Lina Hidalgo, the Harris County judge (the equivalent of a county executive) told me. "We didn't expect this level."

"If the explosive growth in the urban centers and suburbs continues [for Democrats] that will be the whole ballgame," says Richard Murray, a longtime political scientist at the University of Houston who has forecast the 1 million vote metro advantage for Biden.

While Trump and other Republicans are consolidating crushing advantages in small-town and rural communities, Murray says, the stagnant or shrinking population in those places means Republicans "just can't keep pace with this big [metro] vote."

Republicans still have many advantages in Texas -- particularly overwhelming support in its sprawling rural areas -- and most observers consider Trump something between a slight and a substantial favorite to hold it.

And the consequences of failure are almost unthinkable for them: Given the Democratic dominance of other large states -- including California, New York and Illinois -- there is no viable path for Republicans to win the White House without holding Texas and its 38 Electoral College votes.

Losing Texas -- either next week or in 2024 -- would register in Republican circles as a uniquely powerful earthquake that would rattle their confidence in the party's direction and message, many GOP insiders agree.

A return to competition

"Texas is in transition on steroids now," Matthew Dowd, a former top adviser to Republican former Texas Gov. (and later President) George W. Bush, told me in an email. Dowd, who was earlier an adviser to top Democrats in the state, says that "Republicans will not be able to consolidate [control] again. The change is already past the point of doing that. They may still have slight advantage in 2022, but that advantage will dissipate in each year ahead."

Bill Miller, a prominent Texas lobbyist and consultant who has also worked for politicians in both parties, says he believes Republicans retain an advantage in Texas for now, particularly if Biden wins nationally.

In that circumstance, he says, Republicans would benefit from less attention to Trump -- who has repelled many suburban voters in Texas, just as in other states -- and more focus on the agenda Biden will try to pass, particularly his push for higher taxes on high-income earners and corporations. That could help the GOP recapture some of the suburban White voters now rejecting Trump, he says.

But even with those potential tailwinds, Miller agrees that the days of impregnable GOP control over the state have likely ended.

"It's never going to be the way it was," Miller says. "Six years ago, Republicans looked at a seat, they won it. The only races were [the] Republican primaries: who could be the most conservative. That's over. Now it's very competitive. It's not that Republicans have all the money and good candidates and Democrats don't. Now they have money and good candidates too. It's all in."

Even if Biden doesn't win the state, a commanding showing in the metro areas could lift Democrats seriously competing for as many as half a dozen Republican congressional seats and bidding to flip enough seats in the state House of Representatives to regain control of the chamber for the first time since 2002.

The New York Times poll released Monday showed Biden leading Trump across the 12 mostly suburban Texas congressional districts considered most competitive, terrain that almost entirely overlaps with the seats Democrats are contesting in the state Legislature. The University of Texas poll likewise showed Biden leading Trump in all four of the state's major metropolitan areas.

A new era of political competition in Texas would mark a back-to-the-future trajectory for the state. Like most Southern states, Texas, which seceded to join the Confederacy, unflinchingly supported Democrats for most of the first century after the Civil War. Although Republican John Tower broke through to win a Senate seat in 1961 (replacing Lyndon Johnson when he became vice president), the GOP didn't really establish a beachhead in the state until Republican Bill Clements won the governorship in 1978.

The next 16 years offered the longest period of sustained political competition in the state's history. The two parties alternated winning the governorship in the four elections from 1978 through 1990 (starting with Clements and ending with tart-tongued Democrat Ann Richards), and while Republicans easily carried the state in each presidential election over that period, Democrats maintained control of the state Legislature and US congressional delegation.

Over this era, the Republican coalition was centered on suburbs filled mostly with White voters who had joined a "White flight" exodus from cities as minority populations grew and who remained intently hostile to taxes. Democrats relied on a big urban vote combined with support in rural areas with voters whose ancestral loyalties to the party were so great that it was said they would vote for a "yellow dog" before a Republican (at least in state races).

"Historically, this is really hard to understand, the rural areas had been the base of the Democratic Party," says Garry Mauro, a Democrat who served as the state's elected land commissioner from 1983 through 1999. "The Republicans carried Dallas and Houston and Austin."

That competitive balance collapsed in 1994. In the backlash that developed -- especially across the South -- against Bill Clinton's chaotic first two years as president, Bush ousted Richards as governor that year, even though she remained personally popular. Democrats have not elected another Texas governor since.

Mauro was part of a class of tough and salty Texas Democrats (including Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock and state Comptroller John Sharp) who held their statewide offices against the Republican tide that year. But Bush and his political consigliere Karl Rove solidified Republican dominance over the state.

In 1998, Republicans -- with candidates including Rick Perry as lieutenant governor and John Cornyn as attorney general -- swept to control all of Texas' statewide offices, including the governorship, when Bush soundly defeated Mauro, the Democratic nominee, for reelection. Democrats have not won any Texas statewide office since.

Over the next few years, Republicans gained unified control of the Texas Legislature and haven't surrendered that since either, in part because of aggressive gerrymanders. Republicans have controlled a majority as well of the state's US congressional delegation since early this century and have held both US Senate seats since 1993 (when Lloyd Bentsen resigned to serve as Clinton's treasury secretary).

Factors for change

Long-term and near-term factors have combined to scramble this equation -- and to do so, as Mauro says, "faster than I thought, and I've been preaching it."

Less visible but also critical has been the shift of the state's population, economic activity and voting totals to the state's metro areas. The so-called "Texas Triangle," which extends from Houston in the Southeast to San Antonio in the Southwest and then north through Austin and Dallas/Fort Worth, accounts for more than 7-in-10 of the state's jobs and about three-fourths of Texas' economic output.

The Texas Triangle "is where all the population growth, all the job growth, all the talent is, where all the Californians are moving," says Steven Pedigo, director of the LBJ Urban Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. "Texas is growing, but it's all in metro. It's not in rural anymore; rural population is declining. It is a metro state."

The big change came in the state's 199 non-urban counties, which have become the foundation of the Republican Party: They've fallen from about 37% of the vote in 1980 to just over 23% now.

For years the political impact of this population shift was muted because Democrats did not make gains in the Texas suburbs comparable to their breakthroughs since the early 1990s in demographically similar communities elsewhere. More college-educated suburbanites in Texas than elsewhere are conservative on both social and fiscal issues, in part because a much greater share of them than in Northern suburbs are evangelical Christians. Largely as a result, Republican presidential nominees carried the full 27-county metro area, which comprises cities and their suburbs, in every presidential election from 1968 through 2012, according to the Murray and Cross study.

Democrats' growing margins

The change is even more apparent when looking at the five core urban counties inside the burgeoning Texas Triangle: Harris (Houston), Dallas, Travis (Austin), Bexar (San Antonio) and Tarrant (Fort Worth). In 2012, Obama won all of them except Tarrant but by a modest combined margin of about 130,000 votes. Four years later, Clinton again won all of them except Tarrant, with a more robust margin of 562,000 votes. Then in 2018, O'Rourke won all five of the core urban counties by a combined total of 790,000 votes -- six times as much as Obama's advantage only six years earlier. Whereas Obama won Harris County by 1,000 votes and Clinton by 162,000, O'Rourke pushed the margin to 200,000 votes.

Early voting has exploded across all of these metro areas in 2020. Harris County has seen an especially dramatic outpouring. Hidalgo, a 29-year-old Democrat and immigrant from Colombia who ousted an older White Republican in 2018, says that in 2016, the county invested $4.1 million to run the election.

This year, the county increased that to $31 million, funding an extensive array of innovative measures that have eased access to the polls, from expanding early voting sites and keeping them open longer to allowing drive-thru voting and even holding a 24-hour voting session later this week. In the process, Harris County has become a powerful example of what voter participation might look like if governments affirmatively make voting more accessible.

"If you build it, people come, and we have lowered the barriers to entry, to safe, secure election," Hidalgo told me. "We see that when you lower the barriers, it wasn't that people were apathetic -- they were ready to participate -- but it was hard [to vote]."

With the county poised to soon surpass its total 2016 vote, Hidalgo says it's not unreasonable to ask how close it can come to the total voter registration of 2.3 million: "I don't see why, with this energy, we can't get as close as humanly possible to that full participation," she says.

Likewise, Steve Adler, the Democratic Austin mayor, told me he expects record turnout there -- in part because the county has registered an incredible 97% of its eligible voters. Enough of them may show up, he says, to push the county's total vote this year up near 700,000, possibly 200,000 more than in 2016.

"That would be historic," Adler says. "The number of people that are voting that are young is just incredible. We're talking about over 35% of people voting in the city are under 40."

Not only is turnout up in Texas' core urban counties, but most observers also expect Biden to exceed Clinton's vote share in them and to match or even surpass the elevated levels of support that O'Rourke achieved in them two years later.

As a result, Murray projects that Biden could win Harris, Travis and Dallas counties by at least 300,000 votes each -- stunning numbers. Bexar and Tarrant (which Murray expects Biden to capture) could add another 200,000 votes to his pile. That could put Biden's total lead from the five core counties at roughly 1.1-1.2 million, about double Clinton's level.

The lingering Republican tilt in many of the suburban counties around this urban core will reduce the overall Democratic advantage in the Texas metro areas, but probably not by as much as in the past; Biden is likely to win several of the big Texas suburban counties (such as Fort Bend near Houston and Williamson outside Austin) and at worst significantly reduce the traditional GOP margins in several others (particularly Collin and Denton outside Dallas).

In all, Murray expects the 27 counties in the state's four big metro regions to cast a record 70% of the total vote, and to provide Biden a margin of nearly 900,000 votes. He expects the largely Hispanic counties to add another 350,000 votes to Biden's lead.

That might be a best-case scenario for the former vice president. But even if Biden doesn't quite reach those numbers, the question will remain whether Trump can squeeze out enough votes from the remaining non-urban, mostly White counties. He won 75% of the vote in those places last time and Murray, like most observers, expects he will match or exceed that again.

What's unclear is whether those counties can keep pace with the explosive turnout in the state's urban centers. Murray thinks they won't quite and their share of the statewide vote will slip to a little over 1-in-5, allowing Biden to narrowly capture the state.

Most others still give Trump the edge. Matt Mackowiak, an Austin-based Republican consultant, says it's a mistake to assume the early vote totals guarantee the non-urban share of the vote will decline. Trump will pull out plenty of rural votes, he says.

"If you are analyzing data right now and rural voter is behind suburban and urban, I don't think it means so much," he says, since those non-urban voters are more likely to vote on Election Day than early. If anything, Mackowiak says, compared with 2018, "the rural turnout is going to be so much higher, because they connect with Trump in a way they don't connect with Cruz."

The hurdles that remain

While optimistic that Biden will post strong numbers in the metro areas, many Democrats say they would feel better about their overall Texas prospects if the former vice president's campaign invested meaningful money in turning out voters in the predominantly Hispanic communities along the Mexican border, where participation historically runs low.

I spoke with O'Rourke on Saturday morning, when he was canvassing voters in Collin County, a diversifying Dallas suburb that may tilt away from Trump and the GOP this year.

"While you have a lot of concentrated spending in the Dallas/Fort Worth and Houston metro area because of competitive congressional and state House campaigns, there is a great opportunity for the Biden campaign to invest in the Rio Grande Valley, Laredo, El Paso," he told me. "If you are looking at a neck-and-neck presidential race [in the state] that is going to be won perhaps at the margin you need a presidential campaign to spend in those [areas]."

Mauro is equally frustrated. "When people spend a billion and a half dollars and they can't find money to spend in Texas, I'm sorry, that's pure stupidity," he says.

Beyond his choice to invest only modest sums there, Biden still faces formidable hurdles to capture the state this year. Mackowiak says the deep ideological contrast visible in the presidential race, around issues from taxes to the Supreme Court, may allow Trump to regain some college-educated suburban voters who drifted away from Cruz in 2018. (While Biden may reach 60% support from college-educated Whites in states such as Pennsylvania and Colorado, the latest polls released Monday show him still stuck in Texas well below the 44% of them O'Rourke carried.)

Turnout in the Hispanic counties may not reach the level Democrats need as well -- and, while media polls often have difficulty accurately measuring Hispanic sentiment, Monday's surveys also showed Biden failing to match Hillary Clinton's margin with those voters.

But if Biden wins the presidency with or without Texas, expanding the Democrats' beachhead in the Lone Star state -- with an eye toward fully contesting the state in 2024 -- would surely rank among the party's highest political priorities.

The state's GOP leaders have pursued "a shortsighted and destructive" posture toward the cities, says Adler. "Until we start having statewide Democratic leaders, who is the foil for Republican leadership? The foil in that situation is going to be cities. It used to be just Austin, and obviously we're still bearing the brunt, but it's more than just us."

Adds Hidalgo: "The leadership of the state has made a political calculus they would rather pander to a certain extreme than deliver to these urban areas."

With their decision to frame cities as a threat to their rural and small-town base, the Texas GOP leaders are closely following Trump's tracks. And huge margins in the preponderantly White and socially conservative rural strongholds, as well as incremental improvement among Hispanics, may indeed allow Republicans to hold the state in the 2020 presidential race and maybe the governor's contest that follows in 2022.

But it's not difficult to forecast that the party's prospects will steadily dim through the 2020s if it cannot reverse its erosion in the diverse urban and inner suburban counties growing inexorably in both economic clout and voting numbers.

If that happens, the GOP hold on Texas will become the biggest casualty of the trade Trump has imposed on his party of attempting to squeeze bigger margins out of small-town and rural communities that are shrinking at the expense of provoking greater opposition among cities and inner suburbs that are growing.

"There is obviously huge risk there," says Mackowiak. "You get to a point to where the math doesn't work anymore. I don't think we're there, but you can see the light at the end of the tunnel and it's not daylight. It's a train coming to run you over."

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Why the GOP hold on Texas is loosening - CNN

Former Ohio State Rep. Larry Householder was arrested along with four of his associates in July on federal corruption charges.Photo: John Minchillo (AP)

Two of the five Republicans arrested on corruption charges involving former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder pleaded guilty on Thursday to racketeering. Theyre the first to be convicted in the alleged $60 million federal corruption scandal, which federal prosecutors are already calling one of the largest pay-to-play scandals in the states history, regarding a nuclear and coal bailout bill that Ohio legislators passed last year.

Per the Columbus Dispatch, one of Householders aides, Jeffrey Longstreth, and a lobbyist for FirstEnergy Solutions Juan Cespedes entered their plea deals in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio. The two can now testify against the remaining defendantsHouseholder, former Ohio GOP Chairman Matt Borges, and lobbyist Neil Clarkconcerning allegations that the men accepted millions in bribes from FirstEnergy and its subsidiaries over the course of three years in a bid to fast-track nuclear bailout legislation.

Known as House Bill 6, this legislation focused on subsidizing nuclear and coal power plants with millions of dollars on the taxpayers dime while simultaneously gutting the states mandates for energy efficiency and renewable energy. The bill would hit every Ohio electricity customer, from homeowners to industrial plants, with extra surcharges set to bring in an extra $170 million a year. Legislators earmarked $150 million of that total to bail out two nuclear plants owned by FirstEnergy Solutions (now called Energy Harbor). State lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and Governor Mike DeWine have since called for the bill to be repealed.

The five men were arrested in July on felony racketeering charges. FBI documents related to the charges noted that the combination of phone records, bank records, and text messages paint a clear picture of the partnership between the company and the five arrested Republicans trying to get HB 6 passed.

Both Longstreth and Cespedes both planned to plea guilty to single counts of racketeer-influenced and corrupt organizations conspiracies, the Dispatch reports. These felonies carry up to 2o-year prison sentences and fines of $250,000.

G/O Media may get a commission

As part of his plea agreement, Longstreth admitted that he helped organize and manage the bank accounts of Generation Now, a nonprofit group set up to receive undisclosed donations to benefit Householder and to advance Householders efforts to become speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives. An FBI affidavit said Longstreth funneled more than $5 million in bribes through the organization. Meanwhile, Cespedes admitted in a separate statement of facts to organizing the organizations payments in return for specific official action by Householder relating to the passage and preservation of legislation that would go into effect and save the operation of two nuclear power plants in Ohio. The payments also reportedly went toward fighting off a ballot initiative trying to overturn the $1.3 billion bailout of the plants outlined in HB 6.

Todays guilty pleas by Longstreth & Cespedes move the HB6 racketeering scandal from allegation to admitted fact, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost posted on Twitter. The only remaining question: who else? My team, including a forensic accountant, is going through the first batch of documents in our civil racketeering lawsuit.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Black, who is presiding over the case, declined to set a date for sentencing, saying that he wanted to hold off until after the proceedings for the other defendants wrap up. The other three men have denied the allegations. FirstEnergy has not been charged so far, though the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission reportedly launched an investigation into the company shortly after Householder and his allies were indicted in the scandal.

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Two Ohio Republicans Plead Guilty in Alleged $60 Million Bribery Scandal for Coal and Nuclear Bailout - Gizmodo

For decades, I have been known as one of the most significant voices in the Republican Party. I have advised the Bushes. Ive aided the Quayles. Ive tenderly kissed the Cheneys. But today I come to you to reveal that I am leaving this beloved party of minethe party that educated me, housed me, tickled me, and dressed me up as a donkey and forced me to run drunkenly through the streets of Iowa to scare voters in the 1984 Presidential election.

It is not easy for me to say this, because the G.O.P. raised me. I grew up being fed fresh-baked cookies by GeorgeH.W. Bush every day after school. I was burped as a baby by Ronald Reagan. Dr. Henry Kissinger himself delivered me and slapped my rear in the delivery room. My mother and my father were Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon.

Yet I cannot stand idly by and watch as these crooks take over the party I love. I cannot abide this coarsening of discourse, and so on and so forth, etc., etc. Here are the reasons that I am leaving the Republican Party.

Firstly, our country is being ruthlessly divided by the Commander-in-Chief. Brother pitted against brother, cat against dog, exterminator against cockroach, sentient robot against mad inventor. Americans must accept that, no matter our particular beliefs, we are all citizens of the United Stateswhether we be Republican or Democrat, Canadian or Bulgarian, Mesopotamian or Sumerian.

Secondly, as an elder statesman, I recall a kinder, more genteel time in Congress, when Democrats and Republicans not only worked together but were, in fact, fused into a single amorphous entity, composed of writhing flesh and gravel-grasping tendrils, which governed the entire nation through fear and its hive-mind-like consciousness. Did we live in abject horror of that grotesque bipartisan creature, as it rolled through the Senate, destroying podiums and devouring congressional aides to sate its blind lust for power? Yes. But did we respect it? Of course, we did. Its psychosonic mental energy commanded us to do just that.

Thats what being American used to mean.

Finally, I must impress upon my former colleagues that real Americans do not pledge fealty to a strongman. They do not get down on their knees to kiss the boots of an elected official while crying, Oh, I love you so much, mwah, mwah, mwah, such a nice boot, I love this boot, until, out of embarrassment, an aide has to slowly pry them off the guys leg. And then everyone is just kind of standing around, wondering, What the hell is that guys problem? Is he just obsessed with shoes, or what? Americans dont do that. They dont even like shoes that much.

Ultimately, the rank partisanship of our current era is what the Founding Fathers feared most. Well, except for John Jay. He was terrified of goblins. Benjamin Franklin also thought goblins were real, and James Madison was scared of goblins, too. Also, John Hancock and Alexander Hamilton really talked about goblins a lot in their journals. Come to think of it, almost all of the Founding Fathers were really scared of goblins. But after that came hatred of partisanship. And fear of vampires.

In closing, today I depart from the party I once loved so much with great anxiety for the future of our country but also an abiding faith in the ability of our citizens to rise above their petty disagreements and give me a multimillion-dollar contract at a cable news network. We, as a nation, have blindly forgiven far worse than what Ive done, and I sincerely believe we can do it again. All that it takes is everyone suffering severe head trauma and forgetting the past forty years of my actions and beliefs. Then, and only then, can we transcend the divisiveness of the current moment and move on to a glorious new world in which I can afford a nice renovation of my kitchen, with one of those refrigerators thats built right into the wooden cabinetry.

God bless you all.

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Why Im Leaving the Republican Party - The New Yorker

These Republicans of the 1860s werent angels. Their motives were not uniformly pure. And they didnt always agree with each other. But in response to decades of anti-democratic incitement by white politicians from slaveholding states, who represented roughly just 25 percent of the countrys population in 1860, Republicans in the age of Lincoln and Grant united to make the rules work for the majority, even when doing so required rewriting the rules wholesale.

Its the playbook Democrats today should follow if they win the White House and the Congress next week.

For several decades now, modern Republicans have used every tool at their disposalvoter suppression, gerrymandering, court packing at all levels, midnight bills to curb the powers of incoming Democratic governors, parliamentary chicanery that applies different rules to presidents of each partyto ram a minoritarian agenda down the majoritys throat. How else, after all, could a party that has lost the popular vote in six of the past seven electionsand which will likely lose the eighth, already in progresswield so much power?

If a Biden administration and the Democratic Congress are to have any chance of leveraging the authority that voters may confer on themif they truly want to enact and protect a popular, majoritarian agendathey should look to an earlier generation of politicians that understood the uses of power and the ends to which it could be applied. That generation didnt quiver in the face of established procedure and precedentand neither should Democrats today.

Slavery was first and foremost a violent crime against African Americans. But it also eroded the countrys political and social fabric. In the three decades preceding the Civil War, pro-slavery Southerners and their supporters in the North had degraded democratic institutions and flouted the rights of everyone elsewhite and Blackin the service of preserving the Peculiar Institution. They imposed a gag rule in the 1830s, barring antislavery Northern congressmen from presenting abolitionist petitions in the House. They remanded that the Post Office bar the delivery of abolitionist literature. They crafted a highly unpopular Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 that required Northerners to be actively complicit in detaining Black persons accused of being runaway slaves, at penalty of trial and imprisonment. In the 1850s, after they nullified the Missouri Compromise that barred slavery in certain Western territories, they deployed violence and election fraud with impunity to ram a pro-slavery state constitution through the Kansas territorial Legislature. When Charles Sumner, the fiery Masachussetts politician, dared deliver an antislavery address in the U.S. Senate, a Southern congressman beat him nearly to death.

When, in a culminating moment, 11 Southern states decided to secede rather than accept the outcome of a free and fair election, Republicans finally enjoyed an opportunity to reinvigorate democratic institutions long been under assault by the Slave Power and pursue a bold economic and social agenda that established a foundation for the postwar world.

From 1861 to 1865, during the Civil War years, Republicans used their majorities to pass legislation authorizing the seizure of rebels land and slaves; the Homestead Act, granting federal land to American families who agreed to settle and improve it; the Land Grant College Act, which conferred on each state federal acreage to support the cost of establishing public universities; legislation funding the construction of a transcontinental railroad, which promised to draw homesteaders into a national market, but which alsotragicallyset in motion the violent destruction of Native American communities everywhere the iron tracks took root; and laws abolishing slavery in Washington, D.C., and the territoriesand, later, everywhere in the United States. In effect, the Civil War Republicans fundamentally altered the character of American life.

Despite their supermajorities in Congress and hold on the White House, Republicans left little to chance.

Fearing the federal judiciary, whose membership skewed conservative and pro-slavery, might invalidate their legislative agenda or limit President Abraham Lincolns ability to prosecute the war, in 1863, Republicans added a 10th seat to the Supreme Court.

There was strong precedent for doing so. As the country admitted new territories as states, it required additional federal circuit courts. In 1807 and 1837 Congress had enlarged the Supreme Court to keep the number of justices on par with the number of appellate courts, a practice that reflected the justices dual function as chief circuit judges. During the Civil War, with the population of California and other Western states growing at a steady clip, Republicans saw an opportunity to justify the creation of a new circuit and, thus, a 10th seat on the high court. But principle converged closely with politics. The court was scheduled to consider a case challenging the Unions blockade of the Confederacy; if the justices ruled against Lincoln, their decision threatened to cripple the war effort. They intended to pad their slim majority.

The governing party also restructured the shape of the circuit courts to dilute the influence of pro-slavery judges and create new vacancies for Lincoln to fill, with the advice and consent of the Republcan-controlled Senate.

In other ways, too, Lincoln and his congressional allies threw sharp elbows. In 1864, the president introduced his Ten Percent Plan, which extended an offer of amnesty to all Southerners who would pledge allegiance to the United States and invited any state that could muster up enough such loyal men, equal to 10 percent of those who had voted in 1860, to form a new state government and send representatives to Congress. Radicals introduced their own plan, which required a 50 percent threshold and a stronger, iron-clad oath that few Confederates could meet, but Lincoln pocket vetoed their bill. He wanted a lower bar for readmission, not because he was soft on treason, but to foster political dissent and chaos behind enemy lines. He also wanted to create (on paper, at least) newly reconstituted Southern statesled by men loyal to the Unionthat could cast Electoral College votes for the Republican ticket and help ratify the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery. Ultimately, the reconstituted but hardly reconstructed states of Louisiana, Tennessee and Arkansaswhich were readmitted under Lincolns termsapproved the abolition amendment before the presidents death

In the same way, when the western counties of Virginialargely populated by white yeoman farmers who held the states slaveholding elite in bitter contemptdeclared their independence from the Confederacy, congressional Republicans passed legislation, which Lincoln signed, admitting them as the new state West Virginia in 1863. A year later, they made the sparsely populated Nevada territory a state. Thus the party gained four new U.S. senators, a reliable slate of presidential electors and a support for a broad assault on slavery.

Lincolns death complicated matters. In what was surely his worst decision in public life, the president had replaced Vice President Hannibal Hamlin, a reliable antislavery politician, with Andrew Johnson, a deeply insecure white supremacist from Tennessee who had remained loyal to the Union, but whose sympathies lay with his native South. The next four years witnessed acrimonious conflict between a revanchist, racist president and a Republican supermajority that repeatedly overrode his vetoes and governed over his head.

Between Lincolns death in April 1865 and the opening session of the new Congress that December, Johnson unilaterally readmitted Southern states and invited them to hold elections. This, despite their widespread enactment of Black Codes that reintroduced slavery in all but nameimpressing free Black children into apprenticeships, proscribing the right of Black persons to free expression and assembly, barring ex-slaves from owning guns and compelling them to sign labor contracts that bound them to their former owners. Adding insult to injury, the Southern states sent a slate of prominent ex-Confederates to Congress, including Alexander Stephens, the former Confederate vice president who arrived in Washington that winter as a senator-elect from Georgia. In Johnsons mind, the war was over and slavery dead, at least on paper; the rebellious states should be welcomed back to their prior relationship with the federal government immediately.

But congressional Republicans viewed matters otherwise. They saw an unreconstructed minority refusing to accept its defeat. On December 4, 1865, amid widespread anticipation of the impending political crisis, the newly arrived members of the 39th Congress descended on the Capitol for the opening session. At noon, the House clerk, Edward McPherson, a former two-term congressman and protg of Thaddeus Stevens, stepped up to the rostrum and gaveled the House into session. Stevens, the radical leader, if not dictator, of the House, by one members estimation, served as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, a position akin in the 1860s to majority leader. An uncompromising opponent of slavery and unforgiving foe of slaveholders, he cut an austere figure. Stevens instructed McPherson to skip the names of the Southern members-elect as he read the roll call. When a Northern Democrat rose to intercede on behalf of Congressman-elect Horace Maynard of Tennessee, Stevens replied tartly that all motions were out of order pending election of a new speaker. I cannot yield to any gentleman who does not belong to this bodywho is an outsider, he remarked. The House flat-out refused to accept the credentials of the Southern members-elect, as did the Senate. The non-congressmen packed up their bags and went home.

Over the next 3 years, the Republican Congress overrode Johnsons vetoes to enact legislation enshrining civil rights for freedmen and splicing the former Confederate states into five military districts. Until Southern states accepted the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery and the 14th Amendment, establishing a broad swath of civil rights for all natural born citizens, including freedmenand until they established new state governments on the basis of universal male suffragethey would remain under martial law and go unrepresented in Washington.

Republicans invoked a number of justifications for their procedural and policy measures. Stevens held that the Confederate states were conquered provinces whose citizens had forfeited their citizenship rights. Charles Sumner, the radical senator from Massachusetts, held that Southerners had committed state suicide. But most Republicans hung their hats on a section of the Constitution that guarantee[s] to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government. If loyal white persons and Black freedmen were denied their right to property, free expression and assemblyif elections were marred by fraud, violence and disenfranchisementCongress had an obligation to intervene on their behalf.

Governing in opposition to Johnson, the Republican supermajorities in Congress bent the system as far as it would go. Fearing the new president might pack the judiciary with loyalists, in 1866 they once again changed the composition of the Supreme Court, eliminating three seats by means of attrition. The next three vacancies would go unfilled until the number of justices fell to seven, thus depriving Johnson of the power to appoint anyone to the bench. (In 1869, after Republican Ulysses S. Grant assumed the presidency, they reset the number of justices at nine, where it remains today.) They passed a constitutionally dubious act barring Johnson from dismissing Cabinet officials without congressional approval, a measure intended to protect radical War Secretary Edwin Stanton, who effectively administered the Armys occupation of former Southern states.

In 1867, Republicans admitted another reliable western stateNebraska (1867)and in so doing, gained new senators and electoral votes. Beginning in the 1870s after Johnson left office, but as their hold on power began to slip, they granted statehood to a trove of thinly populated but (at the time) reliably Republican territories: Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. They did so out of concern that the very rebels who had, in recent memory, raised arms against their country would soon regain control of the federal government.

Remarkably, these bare-knuckle mean and ends were broadly popular. In 1866, the GOP swept off-year elections, bolstering its capacity to govern over Johnsons head. Equally of note, the partya hotchpotch coalition of former Whigs, Democrats, Free Soilers and Know Nothings, which had been a party for only 10 yearsremained fundamentally unified. Despite their pronounced differences over policy and politics, moderates like Henry Raymond and William Pitt Fessenden worked in lockstep with radicals like Stevens and Sumner. With the exception of Andrew Johnsons impeachment trial, in which several moderates broke ranks and voted to acquit the president, on every critical votethe Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Freedmens Bureau Bill, the Reconstruction Act of 1867, and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitutionthe alliance held.

For many years, Americans remembered Reconstruction as a failed experiment, at besta Tragic Era, at worst, an Angry Scar. Its violent overthrow by white Southerners betrayed the early economic and political advancements of millions of freedmen who, for a brief moment in time, experienced self-government and a free labor economy, until the onset of Jim Crow stamped out their gains.

Since the 1960s, however, historians have acknowledged the era for its more lasting, if gradual, revolution. The Reconstruction amendments not only forged a basis for civil rights legislation in the 1960s, and for the legalization of abortion and marriage equality in subsequent decades. From the 1920s onward, the Supreme Court used the 14th Amendment to incorporate the Bill of Rights and extend its federal guarantees to the states. If youre glad that the state of Texas or Florida is bound to respect your rights to free expression, speech and religionyour right not to incriminate yourself or face unlawful search and seizureyou have the Reconstruction-era Republicans to thank.

To be sure, were not living in the shadow of a Civil War. As bad as things are, theyre nowhere near as violent or divisive. But the parallels to our own era are striking. For well over a decade, Republican politicians at the state and federal levels have feverishly assaulted democratic norms and processes to advance a hard-hitting minoritarian agendathe abolition of reproductive rights, dismantling of the Affordable Care Act, deregulation of environmental and safety standards, tax cuts for corporations and the wealthiest Americansthat is deeply unpopular. They know its unpopular. Which is why theyve made it harder for people to vote; manipulated Senate rules to hold judicial seats vacant under Barack Obama, only to fill them under Donald Trump; incited domestic terrorists and extremistsProud Boys, QAnon fanatics, the Klan and neo-Nazisto meet lawful political assembly with violence. The president has openly flirted with nullifying the election if he doesnt like the results. Indeed, the pro-slavery zealots of 1860 could hardly have done it better.

Democrats, should they earn a governing majority, may soon have an opportunity to restore and improve the institutions that a minoritarian party has broken piece by piece over so many years. If so, the lessons of the Reconstruction era are clear: You cant achieve the ends if you dont embrace the means.

To pass elements of the "Green New Deal" or protect and expand the ACA, Democrats might need to dismantle the filibuster, an anti-majoritarian instrument that threatens to scuttle the expressed will of the voters. They might have to unpack the federal courts and expand the Supreme Court by four seats, thus returning to the original standard of one justice per circuit. Theyll surely want to admit new statesWashington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, perhaps other territoriesto the Union, not just because doing so will enlarge the Senate and Electoral College, but because it extends democratic rights to disenfranchised Americans who live in those place. They might even consider expanding the size of the House of Representatives to recalibrate the ratio of those governing to those being governed.

Taking a cue from Thaddeus Stevens, Democratic majorities in the House and Senate should refuse to seat members-elect whose claim to sit in Congress is compromised. In close congressional elections, if uncounted ballots lay piled up in U.S. Postal Service sorting centers, or hundreds of people were unable to vote due to 12-hour-long lines and the arbitrary rejection of absentee ballots, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer can and should invoke the constitutional guarantee of a republican form of government. Make the offending states hold new electionsthis time, properly.

If the Supreme Courtwith Amy Coney Barrett newly installedcancels out a narrow but clear Joe Biden victory by ordering officials in Pennsylvania to throw out ballots that were postmarked before, but arrived after, the election, Congress should accept the competing slate of electors that the governor, a Democrat, certifies. If state officials in Georgia repeat their egregious efforts to suppress the votes of Black citizens, the House and Senate should throw out Georgias entire slate of presidential electors. They should take these measures even if Biden wins the requisite 270 electoral votes elsewhere, to send a clear message: The era of minoritarian rule is over.

Biden, should he occupy the Oval Office, should appoint judges who support a reinvigoration of the Reconstruction amendments, particularly the 14th Amendments clause stipulating that the citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states. Intended by its framers to create a robust federal guarantee of civil rights, the clause fell into disuse in later decades, the victim of an increasingly reactionary Supreme Court that willfully abnegated its purpose. As historian Eric Foner argued in his recent book The Second Founding, there is no reason why it shouldnt be excavated. A rising generation of 14th Amendment originalists might use it to address all manner of issues, from cash bail and police excesses to environmental standards.

Few politicians in American history have understood the uses and ends of power as well as the congressional Republicans of the 1860s. Faced with an existential threat to American democracy, they stared down a violet and revanchist minority and summoned authority earned at the polls to expand the very meaning of citizenship. If next weeks elections go their way, thats the lesson Democrats should take away.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misstated the number of military districts comprising the former Confederate States.

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How Democrats Can Learn Hardball From the Republicans of 1861 - POLITICO