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Former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, legislative Republicans' special investigator into the 2020 elections, released a draft report that highlighted a series of...

(The Center Square) – President Joe Biden’s aggressive push to federalize election law is likely over after proposed legislation failed to pass the U.S. Senate and a second vote to end the filibuster also failed.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, blasted Democrats from the Senate floor Thursday night, saying they should have overturned the filibuster rule to pass the legislation.

“I can understand Republicans [not supporting the bill], but this I do not understand. I do not understand why two Democrats who presumably understand the importance of the Freedom to Vote Act, and as I understand it, will vote for the Freedom to Vote Act, are not prepared to change the rules so that that bill could actually become law," who caucuses with Democrats, said. "That I do not understand.”

Sens. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., and Joe Manchin, D-W.V., have been the focus of the debate and the target of Sanders’ comments. Sinema spearheaded the pushback, giving a speech that defied the president last week.

"There's no need for me to restate my longstanding support for the 60-vote threshold to pass legislation,” Sinema said from the Senate floor last week, responding to Biden’s Atlanta speech where he called for “getting rid of” the filibuster. “There's no need for me to restate its role in protecting our country from wild reversals of federal policy. This week's harried discussions about Senate rules are but a poor substitute for what I believe could have and should have been a thoughtful public debate at any time over the past year."

Biden addressed whether the stalled legislation was the end of his voting rights push during a press conference Thursday. When asked, he would not lay out what executive measures he may carry out, but said he has beefed up Department of Justice efforts to find illegal discrimination.

"We have begun to organize in ways that we didn’t before in communities beyond the civil rights community to make the case to the rest of American people what’s about to happen, what will happen if, in fact, these things move forward," he said.

The voting legislation has major implications for states, particularly those that have passed recent election integrity laws. Democrats have blasted laws like those passed in Georgia, though they are less restrictive in many ways than some other Democrat-led states.

“Democrats label anything they disagree with as racist. Georgia’s voting law does not prevent black people from voting like Senator Warnock says it does,” tweeted former football star Herschel Walker, who is Black and a Republican candidate for Senate in Georgia, which has been the center of voting controversy. “This is not about voter suppression, it is about President Biden and the federal government wanting more power.”

Stacey Abrams, who has questioned election integrity in the past and is running for governor in Georgia, also responded to the bill’s defeat.

“52 Senators – two Democrats and all Republicans – failed their voters, allowing the filibuster to stand in the way of critical voting rights legislation,” she said. “But we are determined to continue this fight on the ground here in Georgia.”

Biden is also under fire for remarks during the same press conference where he balked on saying whether he believed the next election would be legitimate, something that received major pushback.

"Well, it all depends on whether or not we’re able to make the case to the American people that some of this is being set up to try to alter the outcome of the election," Biden said when asked about whether he would trust the midterm election results. "And it’s one thing – look, maybe I’m just being too much of an optimist. Remember how we thought not that many people were going to show up to vote in the middle of a pandemic? We had the highest voter turnout in the history of the United States of America.

“I think you’re going to see the people who they’re trying to keep from being able to show up, showing up and making the sacrifice that needs to make in order to change the law back to what it should be,” he added.

Biden's comments sparked a flurry of criticism from critics who said the president acted irresponsibly by questioning the integrity of the election before it even occurred.

“Can you imagine the media outrage if President Trump said this?” Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said in response to the remarks.

Along with Georgia, Texas has been at the forefront of election law debates. Texas Democrats made national news when they fled the state for Washington, D.C., last year in an attempt to prevent Republican lawmakers in their home state from having the quorum necessary to pass new election security laws. Texas, along with states around the country, passed laws after questions over the security of the 2020 election with increased mail-in voting, ballot harvesting and billions of dollars from private groups that paid for things like ballot drop boxes.

Beto O’Rourke, former Democratic presidential candidate who is running for governor of Texas, has made voting changes a major campaign issue, touting it during a meet and greet in San Antonio this week.

“It’ll literally decide the future and the fate of the state of Texas,” he said. "So we’ve got to overcome this with great organizing and turnout. We are not going to win unless we show up … We’re going to be there and work to earn those votes so that we can win this race.”

There were so many losers to pick from in 2021 for Wisconsin Right Now's annual Wall of Shame awards. Top officials - from partisan...

(The Center Square) – There’s no shortage of Republicans who say the head of Wisconsin’s Elections Commission must resign.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos on Thursday led the chorus of Republicans yesterday who said WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe must resign following claims from the Racine County sheriff the commission broke state law last year.

“People’s trust in Wisconsin’s elections has been tested. Many Wisconsinites feel elections are not safe and secure, and now the Racine County Sheriff’s investigation found clear violations and law-breaking within the Wisconsin Elections Commission,” Vos said. “Clearly there is a severe mismanagement of WEC, and a new administrator is needed. I am calling for the resignation of Meagan Wolfe as Elections Commission Administrator.”

Vos said there are a series of “red flags” that cannot be ignored.

State Rep. Joe Sanfelippo, R-New Berlin, said not only does Wolfe need to go, but any and all staffers involved in the Racine case need to be fired as well.

“I am calling for the immediate dismissal of Meagan Wolfe as the Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator as well as the WEC staff who gave advice to break the law and members of the Elections Commission who voted to break the law. Those actions are the very definition of malfeasance in office,” Sanfelippo said Thursday. “And if the Wisconsin Attorney General continues to refuse to uphold the law then he should resign, too.”

Wolfe has not responded to the calls, or to the claims from Racine County’s sheriff.

The chairwoman of the WEC, Ann Jacobs, did respond on Thursday.

“To put it simply, we did not break the law,” said Commission Chair Ann Jacobs, an attorney from Milwaukee. “In fact, without action from the Commission, many residents in Wisconsin care facilities could have and would have been disenfranchised and not able to vote in the 2020 elections.”

Gov. Tony Evers rebuked Vos and the Republicans over their criticism of Wolfe.

“Elected officials can – and often do – disagree on plenty. But what is beneath the offices we hold and the responsibility entrusted to us is using our platforms to publicly and baselessly disparage and singularly belittle public servants,” the governor said. “Speaker Vos’ comments are unbecoming of his office and the people we serve. It’s my expectation – and one Wisconsinites share – that elected officials in this state treat others with civility and respect. The speaker’s behavior today fell woefully short of those expectations.”

The Wisconsin Election Commission blatantly and openly violated state law and committed felony crimes throughout the state of Wisconsin by ordering that special voting...

Decades ago, space travel without the aid of government bureaucracy was unheard of. After all, the government was the only entity that had the...

In the months leading up to November’s election, voting officials in major cities and counties worked with a progressive group funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and its allies to create ballots, strategically target voters and develop “cure” letters in situations where mail-in ballots were in danger of being tossed out.

The Center for Tech and Civic Life, or CTCL, provided millions of dollars in private funding for the elections that came from a $350 million donation from Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. The CTCL gave “COVID-19 response” grants of varying amounts to 2,500 municipalities in 49 states.

In exchange for the money, elections divisions agreed to conduct their elections according to conditions set out by the CTCL, which is led by former members of the New Organizing Institute, a training center for progressive groups and Democratic campaigns.

A CTCL partner, the Center for Civic Design, helped design absentee ballot forms and instructions, crafted voter registration letters for felons and tested automatic voter registration systems in several states, working alongside progressive activist groups in Michigan and directly with elections offices in Georgia and Utah.

Still other groups with a progressive leaning, including the Main Street Alliance, The Elections Group and the National Vote at Home Institute, provided support for some elections offices.

Facebook, with the CTCL, was also part of the effort, providing a guide and webinar for election officials on how to engage voters. Included were directions to report “voter interference” to Facebook authorities. The company also provided designated employees in six regions of the U.S. to handle questions. Together, the groups strategically targeted voters and waged a voter assistance campaign aimed at low-income and minority residents who typically shun election participation, helping Democratic candidates win key spots all over the U.S.

The little-explored roles of CTCL and other such groups emerged in emails and other records obtained by RealClearInvestigations and public documents secured by conservative litigants and groups, including the Foundation for Government Accountability, which has filed more than 800 public records requests with elections offices accepting the grants.

Previously, the Zuckerberg-funded effort has been described in generally positive terms, notably when NPR reported in December on "How Private Money From Facebook's CEO Saved The 2020 Election" – in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump's doubts about the legitimacy of the process and "Congress' neglect."

Conservatives take a more critical view the effort. “This private funding has never been done before,” said Hayden Dublois, a researcher at the Foundation of Government Accountability. ”We hear about dark money and corporations buying ads, but never have we seen hundreds of millions of private dollars going into the conducting of elections. And states didn’t have any laws on the books to stop it.”

Numerous Trump supporters contend that the 2020 presidential election was rigged or even stolen but have produced little concrete evidence to prove it. But their suspicions aren’t likely to be dispelled by the efforts of the private progressive groups, however legal.

They are among other notable instances of monied interests underwriting public governance and affairs for political ends. In 2018, RCI reported that a New York University School of Law program funded by billionaire Michael Bloomberg had placed environmentally minded lawyers in the offices of Democratic state attorneys general to challenge Trump administration policies. And examples of private efforts to steer cash-strapped public education are numerous, from the Koch charities on the right to more recent race-conscious programs on the left emphasizing the legacy and centrality of white racism in society.

Zuckerberg did not respond to an emailed request from RCI for comment. In a post-election interview, he praised Facebook’s security work during the election and singled out its policing of “misinformation.” He noted working with polling officials to watch for information that might lead to “voter suppression” and said Facebook had strengthened its enforcement “against militias and conspiracy networks like Q-Anon.”

Facebook has banned Trump from its platform and has delisted individuals – many of them conservatives – for espousing views about the election that it insists are “misinformation.”

According to court documents filed by the Thomas More Society, a conservative law firm, the Zuckerberg-funded CTCL allowed elections departments to use grant money to buy vehicles to transport “voter navigators.” The group filed unsuccessful lawsuits in several states before the election, contending the private funding created unconstitutional public-private partnerships. Several other suits remain active.

The election department in Green Bay, Wis., promised as part of its CTCL grant of $1 million that it would employ the vote navigators to “assist voters, potentially at their front doors, to answer questions … and witnessing absentee ballot signatures,” according to documents filed in legal complaints in Wisconsin by Erick Kaardal, a Minneapolis-based lawyer who has worked on the Thomas More Society lawsuits.

Caleb Jeffreys, one of at least two voter navigators in Green Bay, described his duties as including “curing absentee ballots.” Jeffreys, now a city employee in Green Bay according to his LinkedIn profile, did not respond to an interview request.

Tiana Epps-Johnson, founder of CTCL; Whitney May, director of government services for CTCL; and Hillary Hall, senior adviser to state and local election officials for the National Vote at Home Institute, did not respond to interview requests.

Navigators in Green Bay were also part of voter registration efforts, emails show. They worked closely with a local nonprofit group, which requested that public employees work voter registration events. At least two city employees attended with equipment to conduct voter registration and help people apply for an absentee ballot.

Agents from CTCL trained poll workers in Georgia and paid for other individuals to count and tabulate ballots in Wisconsin, which was won by President Trump in 2016 and President Biden won in November by 20,000 votes.

Emails show that Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein, a fellow with the National Vote at Home Institute, directed Green Bay city employees in gathering and counting absentee ballots on Election Day, and that he was granted access by the city to secured areas and served as an on-site contact for the department on election night.

Rubenstein, who did not respond to a call seeking an interview, also provided help in “curing” ballots that were turned in without the appropriate information, including a signature or address.

Dozens of states require voting clerks to inform voters if their ballot has been filled out incorrectly, giving the voter a chance to fix the ballot and have it accepted. In Wisconsin, that practice is encouraged but not mandatory, under the reasoning that it can drain manpower from other tasks.

But with the grant money provided by CTCL, additional manpower made the time-consuming task feasible, freeing up money for more voter recruitment and outreach.

In Lansing, Mich., the elections department used its $443,000 grant to buy more absentee ballot drop boxes and mail absentee ballot applications to every registered voter.

In Georgia, the grants were used to expand curbside voting and conduct “the necessary voter outreach … to promote absentee voting and encourage higher percentages of our electors to vote absentee,” according to a grant application.

Documents inspected by RealClearInvestigations also showed:

In Lowndes County, Ga., CTCL grant money was used to pay $15,000 in attorney fees through June. A county elections official told RCI that the money was paid to lawyers handling public records requests stemming from the elections, a process that she expects will last into the summer.CTCL was “very lenient regarding what we could spend the money on,” Deb Cox, Lowndes County elections supervisor, said. “They put virtually no restrictions on it as long as it relates to the election.”Mahoning County, Ohio, spent $3,500 on a student to monitor Twitter and Facebook and “report any bad actors that may want to disrupt our operations,” one local official stated in its grant report. Grant money was also spent to produce a training video for elections workers.Election officials in Lorain County, Ohio, paid an $8,100 Verizon bill and spent $24,000 on a van at a local car dealership. The van was used to transport equipment between a warehouse and the elections department, an elections official told RCI.In Boone County, Mo., the elections department used $3,000 of the COVID grant to make a rap video and buy radio spots. “We did a rap video to appeal to younger, first-time voters,” Brianna Lennon, Boone County clerk, said. “We wanted to keep it popular in a format that would have the most appeal to young voters. “

Elections departments received millions of extra dollars in federal aid in 2020, including $400 million in CARES Act funding and $425 million in federal Help America Vote Act grants.

Despite the influx of public money, elections departments across the U.S. were hamstrung because of the pandemic, said Ben Hovland, a Trump appointee to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which administers grants to the states.

Hovland praised the CTCL for providing the money to run elections.

“This was a very unique set of circumstances, and what you heard from election officials was that this [private] money was going for the basics of trying to help people vote, keeping people safe, postage – really the basics,” Hovland said.

He was unaware of the spending on rap videos, trucks, lawyers, vote navigators and phone bills with the private money.

“That runs contradictory to what I’ve heard from most election officials,” he said. “But every jurisdiction runs their election different, and each has its own way to spend money, so I can’t speak to any of that. It wasn’t federal funds. It wasn’t taxpayer money.”

As to the need for the money, not all jurisdictions that received a CTCL grant used it. The elections office in Miami-Dade County, Fla., received $2.4 million from CTCL, but did not spend it immediately, instead receiving a six-month extension to use the money. Several other municipalities did not spend the entirety of their grants and have received extensions.

Boosting Democratic Turnout

Vote margins in many of the areas receiving CTCL funding showed increased Democratic voter turnout, part of a strategy to boost the margins enough in Democrat-friendly areas to overcome Republican margins.

President Trump took the reliably Republican state of Missouri in 2020, but President Biden increased the Democratic presidential vote and won Boone County by 7,000 votes. Hillary Clinton had a 5,000-vote margin in 2016.

In Webb County, Texas, which received $2.8 million from CTCL, voter registrations increased by 10,000 over 2016. The new recruits in the South Texas county voted for President Biden by a two to one margin.

In Fairfax County, Va., which received $1.4 million in CTCL funding, Democrats increased voter turnout by 65,458 compared with a 10,564 increase by Republicans in 2020 versus 2016. The state, which trends Democratic, went to Biden.

While seven states have passed legislation this year prohibiting or limiting elections departments from accepting private funding, far more allow it and “it will certainly continue,” said Kaardal, the Minneapolis-based lawyer.

Kaardal contends the plan by these operatives, working in league with some election officials, was to increase the absentee ballot turnout among demographic groups that favored their candidates and to offset the margins by Republicans, typically in areas outside cities.

“It was a pay-to-play scheme, where in exchange for taking this money, the CTCL gets to tell them how to run the election,” he said. “And it will happen again in 2022.”

In Texas, U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant III, an Obama appointee, ruled in favor of the private funding with a stance that was typical among the judiciary in various federal districts and states.

“Ultimately, plaintiffs complain that people with different political views will lawfully exercise their fundamental right to vote,” Mazzant ruled. “That is not a harm. That is democracy.”

It’s a democracy embraced by elections officials across the U.S. who called the 2020 elections the most secure ever.

Paul Adams, elections supervisor in Ohio’s Lorain County, is eager to accept more private grant money after his department received $435,000 for the fall election.

“If anything like this came along in the future, I would certainly apply,” Adams said. He’s convinced the CTCL is a nonpartisan group trying to make voting safe and easy, and can’t understand why some states are trying to halt private money in public elections.

“I don’t think it’s the grants these people are mad about,” Adams said. “It’s more a matter of where they came from.”

(The Center Square) – The teachers union in the middle of a scandal for influencing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's official school reopening guidance gave nearly $20 million to Democrats in the 2020 election cycle, filings show.

Federal election filings reveal that the American Federation of Teachers and its local affiliates spent $19,903,532 on political donations during the 2020 cycle, with nearly all of the funds going to Democrats and liberal groups.

Last year’s AFT donations include $5,251,400 for the Democrats Senate Majority PAC and $4,600,000 for the Democratic House Majority PAC, according to data compiled by The Center for Responsive Politics’ Open Secrets database.

Besides PACs that supported Congressional Democrats, the AFT network also gave to groups like “For Our Future,” a liberal organization that received more than $1.5 million and heralded Biden’s inauguration on Twitter.

“There is so much to celebrate today,” the group wrote on inauguration day. “While we know there is ‘much to repair, much to restore, much to heal, much to build, and much to gain.’ And we're ready, #PresidentBiden & #KamalaHarrisVP!”

AFT affiliates gave to Democratic federal Congressional candidates over Republicans more than 99% of the time in the 2020 cycle, filings show.

The AFT has come under fire recently for its role in shaping CDC guidance around schools reopening. The New York Post reported last weekend on emails between top White House, CDC, and AFT officials that show the AFT crafting language and overall working closely with the CDC. The communication intensified ahead of the CDC’s planned Feb. 12 announcement to recommend whether schools should reopen.

In that February announcement, the CDC ultimately sided with the teachers union and delayed issuing guidance that schools should resume fully in-person classes.

After the emails emerged, Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent a letter Wednesday to CDC Director Rochelle Walensky alleging that political influence from the teachers unions and White House influenced the federal agency’s official guidance. The Republicans argue the agency put “politics over science and Biden-Harris campaign donors over children.“

“Despite prior questions on the matter, recently released emails show that the AFT and NEA were able to weigh in on and lobby for changes made in the CDC’s Operational Strategy for Reopening Schools, the agency’s guidance for reopening schools around the country,” the Energy and Commerce Committee said in a statement.

The AFT defended its lobbying Thursday, saying the CDC should welcome input from other stakeholders and that it is simply representing the interests of their members.

“The AFT represents 1.7 million educators, healthcare professionals and public employees who spent the last 14 months serving on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic,” AFT President Randi Weingarten said. "So naturally, we have been in regular touch with the agencies setting policy that affect their work and lives, including the CDC. We appreciate that under Dr. Walensky’s leadership, the CDC welcomes stakeholder feedback, as opposed to ignoring it.”

The National Education Association network, another large teachers union that consulted on the CDC guidance, gave nearly $15 million to Democratic-tied causes in the 2020 cycle, the vast majority of its spending. The AFT and NEA both endorsed Biden for president in March of last year.

Critics say the donations show teachers unions used their wealth as leverage to influence the Biden Administration.

“The unions knew exactly what they were buying in 2020,” said Aaron Withe, CEO of the Freedom Foundation. "We now see how well that investment is paying off.

“For over a year now, we’ve been told to listen to the science and to follow the guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control,” Withe added. “Now we learn the government health bureaucracy we’ve been told is leading us through this pandemic is actually taking its cue from the teachers unions who’ve been holding our kids hostage to their political demands.”

Weingarten argues, though, her union lobbies Republicans as well, not just Democrats.

“In fact, we contacted the agency more in 2020 during the Trump administration than we have during the Biden administration in 2021 – requesting additional guidance, questioning policy, providing testimony and offering an educator and healthcare worker perspective,” Weingarten said. “And while we have at times been concerned about their conclusions – as we were initially with the change in classroom physical distancing rules – we respect deeply that the CDC career staff has always taken its responsibility seriously.”

Some on the right have called for Walensky’s resignation over the controversy.

“The CDC is supposed [to] be occupied by scientists who do not bow to political influence. This obviously is not the case under Dr. Walensky’s leadership,” said Rep. Greg Murphy, R-N.C., who is also a doctor. “As the most important public health official in America, she should have had the fortitude to reject AFT’s influence in the CDC’s recommendations.”

(The Center Square) – A grassroots coalition of conservatives and Republican state leaders is pushing back after the Biden administration tied federal education funding to adopting controversial critical race theory teachings in schools' curriculum.

The Biden administration in April proposed a new Department of Education rule that gives preference in grant awarding to schools that incorporate into their curriculum content from the “1619 Project,” a controversial history project that is the most prominent work containing critical race theory ideas.

Critical race theory proponents argue that “the law and legal institutions in the United States are inherently racist insofar as they function to create and maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and nonwhites, especially African Americans,” according to Britannica.

In the rule proposal, the Department of Education specifically notes the “1619 Project,” a long-form history writing project carried out by the New York Times that has come under heavy scrutiny from historians and many on the right. Notably, the 1619 project promoted an idea central to many critical race theorists, the teaching that racism and protecting slavery was a driving motivation for the American revolution. The New York Times later walked back that assertion.

“If you remember, The 1619 Project says America's not founded in 1776 with our revolution, it's not founded in 1788 with the adoption of our Constitution,” said University of California at Berkley Professor of Law John Yoo. “It's really founded in 1619 when the first African-American slaves are brought to the United States, and our history ever since then has been one of oppression.”

Critics argue it over-emphasizes the role of racism in American history and is politically motivated revisionist history.

“Parents in particular fear the dissemination of illiberal ideas to their children under the guise of ‘equity,’ and have begun to band together to challenge the movement at the state level,” the Manhattan Institute said in a statement.

Republican lawmakers sent a letter to the Biden administration last week arguing taxpayer funds should not be used to promulgate the theory but no response has been reported so far.

The DOE’s rule proposal references multiple controversial anti-racist activists and says schools will be given funding preference if they “take into account systemic marginalization, biases, inequities, and discriminatory policy and practice in American history” and help students in “understanding their own biases.”

State Battles

Several states have taken up the fight against critical race theory in the education system, including Louisiana, Florida, Texas and Tennessee, among others.

The Texas Senate passed a bill last week to prevent the states’ teachers from being forced to comply with any mandates to teach critical race theory.

“Texans reject critical race theory and other so-called ‘woke’ philosophies that maintain that one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex or that any individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive,” Texas’ Republican Lt. Governor Dan Patrick said. “These divisive concepts have been inserted into curriculums around the state, but they have no place in Texas schools.”

Republicans in other states have pushed back against the DOE rule, saying local leaders have authority over education in their states, not the federal government.

“When Texan parents send their children to school, they expect their students to learn to think critically without being forced to consume misinformation about our country’s founding and the biases of advocacy groups that seek to belittle our democracy and divide us,” Patrick said.

Tennessee Republicans advanced a bill Monday that would ban the state's schools from teaching critical race theory.

Florida Gov. Ron Desantis expressly attacked the idea in unveiling new education spending for his state in March.

“Florida civics curriculum will incorporate foundational concepts with the best materials, and it will expressly exclude unsanctioned narratives like critical race theory and other unsubstantiated theories,” Desantis said.

Grassroots Opposition

A grassroots swell of Americans, mostly on the right, are pushing back against the ideology and argue their tax dollars should not be used to fund it.

The debate over critical race theory hit a high point last year when former President Donald Trump banned federal agencies from using critical race theory materials in their training.

“It has come to the President's attention that Executive Branch agencies have spent millions of taxpayer dollars to date ‘training’ government workers to believe divisive, anti-American propaganda,” Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump, wrote in a letter to the heads of federal agencies last September.

“These types of ‘trainings’ not only run counter to the fundamental beliefs for which our Nation has stood since its inception, but they also engender division and resentment within the Federal workforce,” the letter reads.

The Trump administration’s letter sparked headlines and backlash. However, he received praise from Republicans, many of whom say they are wary of left-leaning curriculum that presents anti-American sentiments, especially when used for educating children.

Political Maneuvering

The Biden administration’s push for critical race theory at the federal level has provided a rallying point for Republicans to attack Biden and use his views for fundraising and campaigning going into 2022.

“On Day One, through executive order, I will immediately instruct the Georgia Department of Education to prohibit the teaching of Critical Race Theory within our public schools,” Vernon Jones, Republican candidate for governor of Georgia, wrote on Twitter. “It’s time for our schools to stop teaching our kids to hate America.”

Biden’s position has become a major talking point for conservative grassroots organizations.

“If you’re looking for institutional racism, it exists within Critical Race Theory,” said conservative author and speaker Candace Owens. “Ban it. At every level. It is the new Jim Crow.”

Beyond the state level, critical race theory is also shaping up to be a defining issue of the 2024 presidential race. Those leaders considered top contenders for the Republican nomination – Florida's Desantis, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and former Vice President Mike Pence – have all been vocal critics.

Hawley called for an investigation into the use of critical race theory in federal agencies last year, and DeSantis has used a common conservative line of attack against the educational dogma, calling it “marxism” on Fox News.

“I do think we need to rediscover in our K-12 system the founding of the country, what makes our country unique,” DeSantis said. “But when you do that, it’s got to be true and solid and factual. And you can’t let it become infected with left wing ideology like Critical Race Theory.”

“Critical race theory is basically teaching people to hate our country, hate each other,” he added. “It’s divisive and it’s basically an identity politics version of Marxism.”

(The Center Square) – Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, met with Republican lawmakers this week to explain the nature of the problem Border Patrol is facing on a daily basis.

“I would argue that it’s the biggest surge that we’ve ever seen in the history of the Border Patrol,” Judd said during a roundtable with members of Congress, Texas landowners, and law enforcement.

The two-day trip to McAllen, Texas, was spearheaded by Ohio U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, and included several Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee. Jordan said House Democrats were invited to come but declined to participate. Jordan says what he saw is a “catastrophe.”

“In all my years in Congress, this has been the most disturbing field tour that I’ve ever taken," California U.S. Rep. Tom McClintock told reporters at a roundtable.

Judd says Border Patrol is overwhelmed by a surge of 18,600 unaccompanied illegal immigrant minors, family units that comprise nearly 53,000 individuals, and 96,600 single adults in March alone.

CBP projects more than 1 million unaccompanied minors will enter the U.S. illegally this year.

During the month of March, Southwest land border encounters and apprehension totaled 172,000 illegal immigrants, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported. An additional 1,000 people per day are evading capture, CBP estimates. These numbers are up compared to February, when border agents apprehended 101,000 illegal immigrants and unaccompanied minors.

However, Acting CBP Commissioner Troy Miller argues the surge at the border “is not new” and that encounters have “continued to increase since April 2020.”

He added, “our past experiences have helped us be better prepared for the challenges we face this year.”

Judd disagreed, arguing, “this surge is unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.”

“Even though we were making 1.5 million arrests, we were actually dealing with about 400,000 to 500,000 individual people – we were just arresting the same people over and over again,” Judd said. Most were single males from Mexico, whereas the types of people crossing today are different, he said. “Today … if we make 1.2 million arrests, we’re actually dealing with about 800,000 to 900,000 different people.”

Taking care of family units and unaccompanied minors requires a great amount of resources, including housing, food, transportation and health care, all paid for by taxpayers. Taxpayers also foot the bill for the processing of and subsequent transfer or release of the individuals into the United States.

“You could cross the border illegally one day and be in Virginia the very next day,” Judd said, referring to the “catch-and-release” program implemented by the Biden administration.

“I personally have apprehended groups from China, from Bangladesh, from Russia, from Poland, from Brazil. And these criminal organizations are allowed to go into these countries, and they’re allowed to advertise their services and make billions of dollars off of human misery. And it’s based upon our policies,” he said, referring to the Biden administration policies that reversed Trump-era policies.

Last month, President Joe Biden appointed Vice President Kamala Harris to oversee the border crisis, however, she has yet to visit the border.

Judd says the current policy of “catch-and-release” only incentivizes illegal immigration. A better alternative is to detain individuals while their immigration case is being adjudicated, he suggested, pointing to the Trump administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols, known as the Remain in Mexico program, which sought to do this.

McClintock said the group of lawmakers “watched literally hundreds of illegal migrants crossing the border and turning themselves in to the Border Patrol," he said. "Groups who were in the company of children under seven had their basic biometric information taken down, and then [they were] dispatched to bus stations to continue into the United States.”

McClintock said the children are held for an average of 24 days and the situation is "getting worse by the day." Mexican cartels net roughly $500 million per month through human trafficking, he said.

“We are feeding the Mexican crime cartels," he added. "The crime cartels are taking in roughly a half a billion dollars a month through this human trafficking network."

Indiana U.S. Rep. Victoria Spartz blamed “perverse incentives and lack of leadership" for the border crisis. “Perverse incentive and lack of leadership from this administration [have] created a real serious crisis at the border. And it has really escalated," she said.

“Forty percent of our Border Patrol agents are busy processing people and changing diapers," she continued. "It means that they cannot do their job protecting the border. It means that Mexican cartels are controlling the border. This is a national security and humanitarian crisis.”

Utah U.S. Rep. Burgess Owens recounted sobbing children and a young woman who was gang raped.

“We have an administration that does not have the backbone to come down here and encourage these great men and women who are doing a job but being overwhelmed right now,” Ownes said.

Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs said the situation was “horrific to see."

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“The cause is great, and it is for me I say, give me liberty or give me death.”

– Patrick Henry

When patriots angrily destroyed a shipload of tea in Boston Harbor in 1773, their “Tea Party” was the most significant incident in Western hemispherical political history. What began as a resistance movement against violations of man’s God-given rights provided the impetus for the revolution for independence and formal self-governing. This not only made America a nation, but the architect of modern republican governing. It was the best of times for liberty and the worst of times for tyranny.

Some 236 years after the uprising in Boston Harbor, in reaction to a government that was abusing funds in the public treasury at the expense of individual liberties, a Chicago radio host “got mad as hell and said: “He was not going to take it anymore.” On Feb. 19, 2009, Rick Santelli of CNBC challenged his disciples to join him at a “Tea Party” to protest runaway spending and violations of of their Constitutional rights. This was the catalyst that christened America’s Tea Party Movement.

With American socialism forced upon us, there is no better time to mark the 10th anniversary of the Tea Party movement than to call them back into action. The Tea Parties were individual groups of patriots, unlike today’s individual protesters. They were well organized and knew their Constitution. They were fed up with Barack Obama’s polices of “fairness and identity voter coddling” as they watched Congress pass every law he proposed.

“It is time everyone pays their fair share.”

– Barack Obama

Viewed as a threat to Obama’s extremism, the Tea Parties were labeled right wing agitators. The liberal media recanted the left’s tried-and-true tactic, condemning the patriots as a white patriarchy resistance movement, angered over Obama’s race. Yet well over 30% of them were non-white.

Tea Partiers were patriotic, religious middle and upper class moderates and conservatives. They began each protest pledging allegiance to America, and ended with prayers of gratitude for liberty. When attacked by leftist agitators, they turned the other cheek in a show of strength. As buses of paid union protesters arrived to harass them, they refused to take the bait and kept on protesting.

As Obama, Pelosi, Reed and Congress doubled down on assaults against our Constitution and our liberty with partisan spending, the Tea Party movement exploded. Peaceful organized protesters all over the U.S. were confronted with insurgents and union workers, paid to disrupt protests against Obamacare. Subversives insulted them, tried to start fights, but could not disrupt their mission to fix America.

“Obamacrats couldn’t make them act like them and resort to violence.”

– David Webb

On Sept. 12, 2009, a Tea Party protest, the largest peaceful protest in history against federal abuse, took place in Washington, D.C. against Obamacare. The Tea Party was upset at how Obama used crooked deals and shady tactics to get it through Congress. According to FreedomWorks, an estimated crowd of over 600,000 conservative protesters participated without one act of violence.

Among the speakers at the rally were House Majority Leader Dick Armey and other congressional Republicans, including Reps. Mike Pence of Indiana, Tom Price of Georgia, and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, and South Carolina’s Sen. Jim DeMint. Pence set the tone for the rally: “Americans wanted health care reform, but never wanted government to run their health care."

Throughout the event, protesters prayed, sang patriotic songs, chanted political slogans, waved the American flag and signs. Gene Healy of the libertarian Cato Institute issued this statement: “They had grave concerns about the economic future of our nation and theft of free market health care.”

Groups of agitators tried to disrupt this landmark gathering throughout the day, calling them racists and radicals and shouting obscenities. The patriots continued to ignore them until they wimped out. By the time they left Washington, the capital grounds were cleaner than when they had first arrived.

In 2013, an IRS official admitted under oath that Obama had asked them to thoroughly investigate the Tea Party and other center-right groups. But this backfired when over 500 groups sued the IRS and won "substantial settlements." Attorney General Jeff Sessions said: "There is no excuse for this! These groups deserve an apology from the IRS. This abuse of power is absolutely wrong.”

Obama claims his greatest gift to America was one they did not want: Socializing their free market health care on Christmas Eve 2009. And it cost him. During his two terms in office, Democrats lost the House, the Senate, and more state legislatures and governors than any other president due to the Tea Party.

“Republicans encouraged the “tea-baggers” to protest everything.”

– Barack Obama

Ten years after the Tea Party movement began, the House Tea Party Caucus is long gone. So too are most of the 87 House Republicans elected in the biggest GOP sweep since the 1920s. In a recent Rasmussen survey, only 8% of all voters identify with the Tea Party. In 2010, Rasmussen found that 39% of voters surveyed identified with the Tea Party and 41% agreed with their politics.

The Tea Party was the only faction in the Republican Party that showed concern for civil liberties. Sen. Rand Paul tirelessly safeguarded the 4th and 5th Amendments. Tea Partiers had a fetish for intransigence over compromise that raised the bar on eventual compromises on policies for the moderates and conservatives. Today’s socialist left is garishly demanding and won’t compromise.

But it’s hard to celebrate the anniversary of someone who can’t be found. What happened to the Tea Party? Average Americans, not patriotic organizations or Tea Party groups, elected Donald Trump. And most average Americans don’t belong to organized political groups. They depend on citizen-led political activists to inform them when Congress and the president need their help. Yet Tea Parties have been asleep for almost a decade. It is time these Rip Van Winkles wake up and put on a pot of tea for American liberty.

“Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.”

– Phyllis Diller

Aristotle wrote, “Ignorance is dangerous.” The socialist left claims they have a mandate. Yet the final tally shows Biden only won by an ambiguous 4%? But we all know numbers don’t mean a thing to socialists. A win is a mandate, even if 50% of America voted against socialism. The right of center and conservatives in Congress will be eaten alive without citizen support. We need the Tea Party and their organized leadership to rescue our liberty by electing patriots in the midterms.

The far left and socialists control government and traditional media. Conservative views are being censored on social media, as well as radio, TV and print media. We need organized groups like the Tea Party who are willing to do what they do best. We need help vetting and supporting patriotic candidates who will win the midterms. We need to bring back the Tea Party caucuses and groups around the nation, to keep the fires of patriotism alive. We need organized, dedicated patriots now.

“A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.”

– Edward Abbey

(The Center Square) – Just days after former President Donald Trump declared Jan. 22 as National Sanctity of Human Life Day, newly sworn-in President Joe Biden disregarded the designation and pledged to codify Roe v. Wade into federal law to prevent any changes that might occur if the U.S. Supreme Court were to overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling.

“The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to codifying Roe v. Wade and appointing judges that respect foundational precedents like Roe,” a statement put out by the White House states.

Just days before, Trump’s proclamation declared that the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision was a “constitutionally flawed ruling [that] overturned State laws that banned abortion, and has resulted in the loss of more than 50 million innocent lives. … Because of the devotion of countless pro-life pioneers, the call for every person to recognize the sanctity of life is resounding more loudly in America than ever before. Over the last decade, the rate of abortions has steadily decreased, and today, more than three out of every four Americans support restrictions on abortion.”

But according to the Biden administration, “In the past four years, reproductive health, including the right to choose, has been under relentless and extreme attack.”

On Jan. 22, 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Texas statute banning abortion, effectively legalizing abortion nationwide. The court held that a woman’s right to an abortion was implicit in the right to privacy protected by the 14th Amendment. Prior to Roe v. Wade, abortion had been illegal nationwide since the late 19th century.

Former President Ronald Reagan declared the first National Sanctity of Human Life Day on Jan. 13, 1984. It was continued under both Bush presidencies and discontinued for eight years each under presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Trump was the only president to attend and speak at a March for Life Rally in Washington, D.C.

In response to Trump’s proclamation, Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life, said, “President Trump has been a champion in seeking to protect unborn children. We are grateful for his dedication to the right to life and the work his administration has done on behalf of the most vulnerable among us.”

The Biden administration also plans to reverse Trump policies that prevented taxpayer dollars from funding Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider.

In 2019 alone, Planned Parenthood lost $60 million after it withdrew from the Title X Family Planning Program, which had previously used taxpayer funds for contraceptive services for low-income individuals. The Trump administration changed the policy to exclude any organization that offers abortion services, resulting in Planned Parenthood withdrawing from the program.

Last year, Planned Parenthood spent more than $27.4 million through a super PAC to support Biden’s election. Alexis McGill Johnson, president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said the fund will work "in partnership with the Biden-Harris administration and the pro-reproductive health care majority in Congress” to “not only reverse the attacks of the past four years, but boldly expand sexual and reproductive health care and rights for all people in the U.S. and across the globe.”

The fund supports the Biden administration's priority to institute taxpayer funding of abortions in the United States and abroad, as well as reversing the funding restrictions the Trump administration instituted on the global Family Planning Program. It has also recommended nearly 200 staffers for key positions in the administration.

Biden’s plan to codify abortion is consistent with Democrats’ efforts in May 2019 when they introduced the Women’s Health Protection Act in Congress.

The bill “guarantees a pregnant person’s right to access an abortion – and the right of an abortion provider to deliver these abortion services – free from medically unnecessary restrictions that interfere with a patient’s individual choice or the provider-patient relationship.”

Cosponsors included Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Cory Booker, D-N.J., and then-Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif.

When Google-owned YouTube suspended Donald Trump’s ability to post videos last week, it joined Facebook and Twitter in blocking the president, and many Trump supporters, from their platforms. Conservatives and others have denounced the moves as censorship. But the decisions by tech companies to refuse service to those they do not approve of – including the president of the United States – also raise concerns about national security.

The Department of Defense uses software created, delivered, and maintained by many of the same high-tech companies now engaged in shutting down online speech. If the titans of tech can pull the plug on public communications tools people have come to rely on, some observers fear, they might do the same to the Pentagon in response to a military action deemed unacceptable by, for example, San Franciscans.

Something along those lines already happened with Project Maven, a major Pentagon initiative using Google algorithms to identify drone targets. The software was well under way when, in 2018, thousands of Google’s workers protested their company becoming a defense contractor.

"We believe that Google should not be in the business of war," began an open letter from Google employees to company boss Sundar Pichai. They demanded that the company create a “clear policy” stating that it and its contractors never “build warfare technology.”

Bowing to this pressure from its own workforce, Google has stepped back from high-profile military projects. The company has been noticeably absent from the scramble among such firms as Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle to win the contract for the Pentagon’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI. A 10-year deal providing cloud computing to the Department of Defense, JEDI is worth billions of dollars.

The Pentagon could rely exclusively on established defense contractors that are not squeamish about the business they’re in. But officials have been eager to work with Big Tech, where they expect to find the top talent that will gain and maintain an edge for the U.S.

That talent is proving to be touchy. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, now has a small union less interested in winning workers’ pay and benefits than in projecting ideological might. “We will use our reclaimed power to control what we work on and how it is used,” the union’s mission statement reads.

It isn’t just external political pressures that have led Big Tech companies to de-platform Trump and his supporters; the pressure also comes from within.

“We will ensure Alphabet acts ethically and in the best interests of society,” declares the company’s workers union, confident in its own ability to discern the best interests of society.

Google isn’t the only conscientious objector. Microsoft did pursue the JEDI contract – over the objections of workers who published an open letter of their own.

“Many Microsoft employees don’t believe that what we build should be used for waging war,” the letter protested. “When we decided to work at Microsoft, we were doing so in the hopes of ‘empowering every person on the planet to achieve more,’ not with the intent of ending lives and enhancing lethality.”

'Software as a Service'

Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, studies military procurement of technology. He says that tech employees are less likely to object to selling to the Pentagon “as computing becomes more like a commoditized service.” Developing generic software that can be used by anyone, including the military, may be less objectionable to Big Tech workers than crafting bespoke war-fighting code. For example, Clark says, “Microsoft sells Office 365 to DoD and has sold Office to the military for decades. Cloud computing and AI are becoming similar generic services.”

But Clark notes there is a difference between how a product such as Microsoft Office has traditionally been sold and the new cloud computing model. In the past, the purchaser would buy copies of the software, whether on discs or other media, and that software would be installed onto customers’ computers. How the customers used the software was generally beyond technology companies’ reach.

The new model is “software as a service,” says Gregory Sanders. He is a fellow and deputy director of the Defense-Industrial Initiatives Group at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In the new model, the product isn’t housed in customers’ computers, but rather in the technology companies’ own servers – in the cloud. It is convenient and allows customers to draw however much computing power they need, not unlike electricity. But if software lives in the cloud, access to the software is regulated by those who control the cloud. Big Tech has shown it can take away software from unpopular customers – and that its judgment of who deserves its products and who does not can change dramatically.

Take Amazon Web Services’ top government sector sales executive, Teresa Carlson. She enraged the rank-and-file when she promised AWS’s “unwavering” support for police, military, and intelligence customers. That was in the summer of 2018. Things were very different two years later. The May 25, 2020, death of George Floyd led to nationwide protests against police. Reacting to the rioting, Amazon announced it was “implementing a one-year moratorium on police use of Amazon’s facial recognition technology.” That technology, called Rekognition, had been made available through the cloud.

There are reasonable debates to be had about what technologies governments should have access to and how they should be used. But what if the military comes to rely on technologies such as the cloud only to find that in a crisis those technologies are shut down or disabled by companies responding to the ideological demands of their own employees? These “security of supply considerations” are risks “the Department of Defense thinks about a lot,” Sanders says.

Internal ideological revolts have roiled companies beyond the tech giants, and are becoming a common cause of conflict between labor and management, even when management shares labor’s woke values. In June, staff at the New York Times rebelled against the editorial page for publishing an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton. The Arkansas Republican had advocated enlisting the military to help quell rioting. Editorial page editor James Bennet was pushed out and six months later his deputy resigned as well.

The Hudson Institute’s Clark says that if a tech giant withdrew access to services it had agreed to provide to the military, it would likely have to pay penalties for breach of contract. Such fines might make little difference to the bottom line of Big Tech. But the loss of cloud capabilities in the middle of a conflict could be disastrous for warfighters.

Sanders says the Pentagon could always invoke the Defense Production Act “if a company pulled out of a service provision in a crisis environment in a non-orderly manner.” As the Congressional Research Service puts it, the act “allows the President to require persons (including businesses and corporations)” to “prioritize and accept government contracts for materials and services.”

That might keep tech companies from leaving the government fully in the lurch in a crisis, but it isn’t a guaranteed strategy for success.

“The quality of work you get when compelling an objecting vendor wouldn’t necessarily be the best, so DoD wouldn’t want to invoke those authorities needlessly,” Sanders says.

Big Tech has proved willing to shut down service and shut out customers who become unpopular with Silicon Valley. That should be a red flag for government agencies that are considering housing their capabilities in the cloud – do they want to be constrained by the tech industry’s morals of the moment?

In its final days, the Trump administration is seeking to disrupt the way progressive activists increasingly impose their will on big business: through banks controlling the loan lifelines to the economy.

The Fair Access to Financial Services Rule (FAFSR), just finalized by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), aims to prevent lenders from blackballing businesses in industries opposed by the left by requiring banks to demonstrate that their loan decisions are “based on quantitative, impartial risk-based standards,” rather than political or reputational concerns.

FAFSR is a response to successful pressure campaigns waged by environmental groups and congressional Democrats, which culminated in every major American bank refusing to finance drilling projects in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), despite such drilling being authorized by President Donald Trump in 2017.

Bryan Hubbard, an OCC spokesman, told RealClearInvestigations that the rule codifies longstanding OCC guidance on banks’ obligation to provide equitable access to their services, and will ensure that banks are not “terminating entire categories of customers.”

The rule has been published in the Federal Register, though it may prove short-lived. Many Democrats oppose the measure, and they will have 60 legislative days to disapprove it by a simple majority vote, as provided under the Congressional Review Act.

The Arctic drilling conflict highlights the power of progressive groups to intimidate, cajole, and partner with corporate powerhouses to advance their agenda – often beyond legislative confines. Through boycotts and other pressure campaigns, progressives have sought to push corporations to adopt their social and cultural values on issues ranging from climate-change policy to gun control. Firearms dealers, oil producers, payday lenders, and workers in other controversial industries have had their access to capital stunted by these campaigns, which are often aimed at the circulatory system of the economy – the banking industry.

Oil companies had spent decades working through Washington channels – engaging in lobbying, writing white papers, and, of course, offering generous campaign contributions to sympathetic legislators – to obtain permission to drill in ANWR.

The debate over drilling in the nation’s largest wildlife reserve has raged since portions of the 19-million-acre area were first set aside under President Dwight Eisenhower in 1960. Twenty years later, President Jimmy Carter signed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which expanded the size of the reserve but opened up a coastal plain (the so-called 1002 Area) to oil exploration, subject to prior congressional approval.

That authorization has proven elusive, as preserving ANWR became a cause célèbre among environmentalists.

In December 2017, however, Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which included a provision written by Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski authorizing oil exploration in the 1002 Area. The Republican lawmaker speculated that the project could generate “$60 billion in royalties for [Alaska] alone.”

As the required environmental review process moved forward, opponents took action.

In January 2020, Senate Democrats sent a letter to all major American banks, requesting that they “stop financing . . . oil and gas drilling and exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge” in order to better “prepar[e] the U.S. economy to weather the growing impacts of the climate crisis.” The letter echoed themes found in later pressure campaigns waged by such environmental advocacy groups as the Sierra Club and Greater Good.

The banks fell quickly in line. In February, Wells Fargo announced that it would not “directly finance oil and gas projects in the Arctic region, including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).” Citigroup declared that it would “not provide project-related financing for oil and gas exploration and production in the Arctic Circle.” By Dec. 1, every major American bank had announced its refusal to finance drilling in the region, despite congressional authorization for development.

In response, Murkowski and Alaska’s other members of Congress sent a joint letter to Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell in June, urging him to take action. The delegation highlighted how the banks in question were using “reputation risk” – the risks associated with public disfavor brought by financing politically and morally controversial projects – as a justification to deny Arctic drillers access to capital.

“By denying financing under the guise of reputation risk,” the lawmakers wrote, “these [banks] are discriminating against America’s interests, our economic recovery, and our workers, all while utilizing significant federal support and benefits.”

The regulation proposed by the OCC aims not only to end this standoff but also to ensure that other businesses “involved in politically controversial but lawful” industries are not excluded from capital markets.

Hubbard of OCC emphasized that banks receive federal deposit insurance and are given “the privilege of a national license to operate,” a license that he claims imposes on banks certain obligations. Banks have a duty, Hubbard said, to provide proportionate access to financial services, even for clients involved in legal but politically controversial industries.

(The Center Square) – Lost amid the national headlines of a second impeachment pf President Donald Trump last week was a transition of power at the state level that deserved barrels of ink and far more pixels – not only in Illinois, where it occurred, but across the country.

Illinois state Rep. Michael Madigan lost his bid for what would have been 40 years in legislative leadership when Emanuel “Chris” Welch (D-Hillside) on Wednesday was voted in by his peers along party lines and became the first Black Speaker of the House in Illinois history.

The Madigan story is a cautionary tale that should be written into U.S. history books to inform future generations about how absolute power corrupts absolutely.

On his way to establishing a U.S. record for tenure by a legislative leader, Madigan, an old-school Chicago Democrat, ruled with one-sided leadership that, over 38 years, ran a once-proud state – unchecked – into irreparable financial ruin.

Madigan was a king who steamrolled the state’s solvency for the benefit of the cogs in his machine and to retain his power. His reign was ended only after Illinois House Democrats no longer could risk supporting him. And even then, Madigan hung around in contention to retain his role last week with 50 of the 60 supporters he needed for another turn at the wheel.

A federal corruption probe into ComEd isolated Madigan as the dealmaker who traded patronage jobs for favorable legislation and rate increases to help the energy producer survive its struggling nuclear power plants. Two of his cronies, and two former ComEd executives have been indicted.

Madigan, who neither has a cell phone nor an email account, hasn’t been charged with a crime. A grand jury continues to investigate. If anyone benefited from the chaos wrought by COVID-19, it was Madigan, who shaved off about 70% of the legislative calendar in 2020 and kept the entire legislature at bay and off the job arguably to shield himself from public scrutiny.

But, even here in Illinois, news of Madigan’s ouster from leadership barely registered with most people – and in some markets didn’t even make the front page of newspapers.

Therein lies a fundamental problem that isn’t on its way to being repaired. We don’t teach civics in our public schools. Kids don’t know the difference between a state representative and a U.S. representative let alone know who represents the districts where they live. These same people grow up and become adults who complain about government but cannot connect the dots between government expansion and the fundamental reasons their tax burdens are twice the size of neighboring states.

We have raised generations of mopes who are barely equipped to rage against their washing machines let alone bad government.

There are no term limits in Illinois. Madigan became chairman of the Democratic Party of Illinois and became not only the pivot in Springfield but the kingmaker who funded campaigns and sent a steady stream of lackeys there to do his bidding.

His House rules called for him to unilaterally call the bills that were to be voted upon and none that he didn’t want. That made bipartisan legislation impossible and effectively neutralized the minority party Republicans for nearly four decades.

The Madigan Rules were akin to playing basketball against the Harlem Globetrotters with one exception: In basketball, the team that is scored upon, by rule, gets the ball and the chance to in-bound it after each basket. Here in Illinois, the game is make it, take it.

And Madigan did of plenty of taking, mostly from taxpayers who will feel the pain of his leadership long after our children’s children are eulogized by their children.

Under his leadership, the state’s finances cratered. Costs exploded. Billions of dollars were borrowed at crazy, near-junk rates. Pension systems were raided to pay for anything and everything except pensions. Estimates of the unfunded pension obligations created under his leadership range between $137 billion and $250 billion – a hole that may never be filled and continues to grow deeper despite tax increase after tax increase.

The truth is that all government is local, and local government has far more influence on the lives of Americans than the federal government. Worse, state government is a murky mystery for far too many.

The Center Square has written more than 600 stories about Madigan over the past three years alone. Our reporters chronicled his unbalanced budgets, the #MeToo scandals that were unresolved by an inspector general (because he cleverly omitted having one and the claims expired), the gerrymandered maps that he drew, and a litany of other political shenanigans that would require a forest of trees to lay out in full.

Some of that drama finally ended last week. But rest assured there will be decades of drama here still to come.

When asked if his plans for his new role, the newly ordained Welch, whose committee passed on an opportunity to investigate Madigan in December, said that he’d, “possibly make a lot of changes.”

Welch also praised Madigan's tenure.

After all, Illinois is still Illinois.

* * * *

ILLINOIS

New Illinois House Speaker Emmanuel “Chris” Welch is the first Black speaker in Illinois House history, taking the gavel away from Michael Madigan, the state's most powerful politician. Until Wednesday, Madigan held the spot for all but two years since 1983. In a statement closing out the 101st General Assembly, his last as Speaker of the House, Madigan wished Welch “all the best.”

Policing in Illinois could look different after a sweeping criminal justice bill was passed by lawmakers in Springfield. House Bill 3653, which passed by a 60-50 vote, will change use-of-force guidelines, require body cameras for every police department in the state, end cash bail, and strip collective bargaining rights relating to discipline from police unions. The Senate passed the bill in the early morning hours of Wednesday by a 32-23 vote.

* * * *

Elsewhere in America...

TENNESSEE

Tennessee will be the first state in the nation to receive federal Medicaid funding in a lump sum. Gov. Bill Lee signed a 10-year TennCare block grant authorization into law Friday after the Tennessee Legislature passed it last week, giving the state more autonomy on administering its Medicaid program. The federal government currently funds a portion of TennCare’s costs, regardless of fluctuations each year. Under the block grant, however, the state would receive federal funds in a lump sum, providing for more flexibility in managing the funds. State officials believe the block grant also will result in cost savings for the program.

NORTH CAROLINA

Wilmington residents David and Peg Schroeder sued the city after it enacted a short-term rental ordinance that capped the number of properties that can operate as rental homes in the same area. The couple sought legal help from the Institute for Justice and won its case when a New Hanover County Superior Court judge declared the ordinance "void and unenforceable." Wilmington officials, however, have continued enforcing the policy and delayed revisions to it by at least three months.

FLORIDA

State Sen. Danny Burgess, R-Zephyrhills, filed legislation last week that would require social media websites to provide individual and business users notice that the website has suspended or disabled a user’s account with some recourse available to restore the account. Burgess characterized the bill as an “innovative and timely piece of legislation” that “originated from numerous constituents facing issues by these monopolized monster social media companies right in our own backyard.”

VIRGINIA

A Mason-Dixon Polling and Strategy poll released last week showed a majority of Virginia residents supported measures to provide financial support for parents who opted to enroll their children in alternative education systems while the state's schools remain closed. The poll found that 61% of registered voters would support giving parents a portion of the state’s K-12 funding to use for home, virtual or private education if public schools remain closed for in-person classes. And 51% of respondents supported Gov. Ralph Northam giving new federal relief funding for education directly to parents for purchasing education technology and materials, private school tuition and home education.

PENNSYLVANIA

Pennsylvania lawmakers dismayed by Gov. Tom Wolf’s apparently limitless power following his declaration of a state of emergency are moving closer to amending the state constitution to put a check on that power. Lawmakers tried other tactics to constrain Wolf in 2020, including passing bills targeting specific orders, but he vetoed those bills – even when they passed on a bipartisan basis. Now, if the Legislature approves the constitutional amendment, voters will get a chance to weigh in on the issue.

NEW YORK

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo delivered a State of the State address spread over the course of four days and capped it with a proposal to spend tens of billions of dollars on infrastructure building in what he called a “new New York.” Among his goals are revamping Penn Station, Pier 76 and the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City in a $51 billion investment that he says would create 196,000 jobs.

NEW JERSEY

State lawmakers in the Garden State are moving toward the creation of a commission that would focus on the high number of rules and regulations in the state that can serve as a drag on the economy. The New Jersey Business and Industry Association has come in favor of the creation of the commission, saying it would make the state “more responsive to its residents, more accessible to people and small businesses that do not always have the opportunity to impact government, and more transparent to all taxpayers.”

OHIO

Ohio took a step toward criminal justice reform when Gov. Mike DeWine signed a bill into law that favors treatment over jail time. The legislation, applauded by both Republicans and Democrats, requires judges to hold a hearing if a defendant applies for intervention and claims drug or alcohol abuse was a factor leading to the crime.

INDIANA

Overflow crowds of concerned citizens filled the hallways of Indiana’s Capitol as the legislature held a hearing on a bill that would stop employers from making people get a vaccine as a condition of employment. The bill, introduced by Sen. Dennis Kruse, R-Auburn, adds a freedom-of-conscience provision to Indiana law, affirming the right of citizens to opt out of vaccines for pretty much any reason.

KENTUCKY

A special committee created to review an impeachment petition against Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear has given him until Jan. 22 to respond in writing to the claims against him. Meanwhile, the committee has also received a similar petition against a state lawmaker. Committee Chairman state Rep. Jason Nemes, R-Louisville, sent the formal invitation to Amy Cubbage, Beshear’s general counsel, in a letter dated Thursday.

LOUISIANA

A New Orleans social worker has sued Louisiana Department of Health leaders, arguing that denying her a license violated her constitutional rights. Ursula Newell-Davis, founder of Sivad Home and Community Health Services, is not challenging the need for the license itself, but the state’s “facility need review” policy, which requires certain types of providers to show their services are needed before they can get a license to practice and receive taxpayer dollars through the state’s Medicaid program.

TEXAS

Texas state lawmakers convened last week to begin the 87th Legislative Session. The legislature is expected to address the state’s $1 billion 2020-2021 biennial budget shortfall, police funding, and a long list of other measures in less than five months.

ARIZONA

In the wake of a ballot initiative giving Arizona one of the nation's highest top marginal income tax rates, Gov. Doug Ducey announced in his state-of-the-state address that he plans to ask lawmakers to cut income taxes. The lame-duck governor said he wants to "think big" in terms of lowering the state's tax burden and restore Arizona's reputation as a destination for people seeking an affordable place to live.

COLORADO

Colorado lost its bid to be the permanent headquarters to U.S. Space Command on Wednesday, a move the state’s leaders say is politically motivated and will cost taxpayers. Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs – where the Space Command has been temporarily headquartered – was one of the six locations being considered, but Redstone Arsenal in Alabama was selected “based on factors related to mission, infrastructure capacity, community support and costs to the Department of Defense.” Space Command would have accounted for an estimated $104 million in earnings and $450 million in economic activity in Colorado.

WASHINGTON

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee unveiled his latest capital gains tax proposal as part of his 2021-2023 proposed budget last month, which would tax the sale of stocks, bonds, and other assets at a rate of 9% on capital gains above $25,000 for individuals and $50,000 for joint filers. Opponents of a capital gains tax argue that it stands little chance of holding up in court and note that new taxes are unnecessary when state revenue is forecast to be relatively strong for the near future.

Chris Krug is publisher of The Center Square. Executive Editor Dan McCaleb and regional editors J.D. Davidson, Derek Draplin, Cole Lauterbach, Delphine Luneau, Brett Rowland, Jason Schaumburg and Bruce Walker contributed to the column.

Now that pro Trump people are rioting, they've adopted the term "insurrection." It's wonderful that all of the left and news media have finally all...

(The Center Square) – What exactly did we see Wednesday at the Capitol?

We know what we were shown. We know what we watched.

I suspect that you saw what I saw, and then on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, read what I read.

But what happened Wednesday at the Capitol isn’t known for certain. And I am not confident that we ever will know. Because to know, far more questions must be asked and then answered. I am not confident that the questions will be answered.

Something has changed in journalism. Conclusive outcomes are made in real time across all platforms today, and then the spin overwhelms the need for the pursuit of the truth.

In fact, for all the presumptive conclusions that you’ve read or seen in the days since, a tremendous number of questions remain to be answered.

Let’s start here: who stormed the Capitol? Again, what I saw was what you saw. A lot of Donald Trump flags, MAGA hats and signs.

These were all Trump supporters? Doesn’t seem plausible.

Could it be that simple? Probably not.

People inside the Capitol who certainly were not pro-Trump have been questioned by police. John Earle Sullivan, an activist with who founded a Utah group that is openly anti-fascist and a supporter of Black Lives Matters, captured 40 minutes of video with a female partner from inside the Capitol. That wasn’t being reported in Washington. It was reported in Utah, where Sullivan staged another protest that led to a man’s death.

On the video itself, the Insurgence USA founder can be heard saying, “As far as them storming the Capitol, I knew that was going to happen,” he said. “I’m on chats that are underground that are sending out flyers that are just like, ‘Storm all Capitols on the 6th.’ It wasn’t anything that was secret. It was something that was out there ... and they did it.”

Sullivan, whose video includes the shooting of Ashli Babbitt, was at the front of the mob.

Here in Chicago, I have seen multiple reports of a CEO who was charged for violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds. His company fired him Friday. Similar callouts are happening around the country to identify and cancel not only those charged with crimes but those who simply were around the Capitol who had the misfortune of appearing on someone else’s camera.

If you’d watched Washington Post’s livestream Wednesday, you’d have been led to believe that all of the people within the camera’s view were men and women who were pro-Trumpers disenchanted by the election results of Nov. 3 and then the Georgia Senate races Tuesday night that turned out from all corners of the far right for the purpose of popping off like blood-filled ticks at the Capitol. That they had saved it all up for one final turnout in Washington, D.C.?

Say that out loud. Then think about it.

I struggle with the full plausibility of such a storyline, which we are being fed by some of the same national outlets that characterized 2020 riots in Kenosha, Wis., as “fiery but mostly peaceful” and in Minneapolis as not “generally speaking, unruly,”

That would seem to be, for any worthwhile journalist – at a minimum, lacking balance in perspective.

We should be asking why only 14 people were arrested at the scene by Capitol Police.

The Capitol Police were tactically miserable on a day made for opportunists of all stripes. Sadly, they lost one of their own in the madness.

Why is it we know all manner of things about Babbitt, the woman who was shot inside the Capitol? We know her name. What she did for a living. That she supported Trump. That she had a MAGA hat. That she owned a pool supply business. That she served 14 years in the Air Force. That she posted Q-Anon content on social media.

We don’t know – at this time – the name of the Capitol Police officer who shot her. No calls to ferret that out. No effort there. That would be contrary to the way the media swarmed to name the police officers who arrested George Floyd in Minneapolis or shot Jacob Blake in Kenosha. The names of those officers were all over the news in a matter of hours.

There is no denying people from the Save America March were loose in the Capitol. That’s indisputable. You can watch the people physically move from the rally to the Capitol.

And, for sure, there were pro-Trump supporters inside the building.

But who else was in there, and who in the media will make the effort to tell that story?

Perhaps only us.

* * * *

Elsewhere in America …

GEORGIA

The Democrats wrestled control of the U.S. Senate after Tuesday's runoff elections in Georgia. Republican incumbent Kelly Loeffler conceded to Democrat challenger Raphael Warnock on Thursday, vowing "to stay in this fight for freedom." Republican incumbent David Perdue conceded Friday to Democrat Jon Ossoff in a runoff that was called Wednesday for Ossoff. The Perdue campaign had said it would "exhaust every legal recourse to ensure all legally cast ballots are properly counted," but ended its efforts Friday afternoon.

FLORIDA

New legislation filed in Florida ahead of the spring legislative session extends COVID-19 protections to businesses, schools, nonprofits and religious institutions. Businesses would be immune from liability if courts determine the businesses have “substantially” complied with government-issued health standards or guidance. Republican leaders said separate legislation will address liability protection for the health care industry.

VIRGINIA

Although a new law allowing public-sector collective bargaining in Virginia does not go into effect until May, at least two Virginia counties are preparing to spend more taxpayer money on staff and resources if public-sector collective bargaining is approved in each county. In Fairfax County, it is suggested $1 million at the county level and $600,000 at the school board level be directed to support collective bargaining negotiations. The Arlington County Board has directed its county manager to provide budget recommendations for fiscal year 2022, with considerations for additional costs related to collective bargaining.

TENNESSEE

The state released details of a $100 million literacy initiative that will provide optional reading resources and support to students, teachers and school districts. The goal is to help students to read on grade level by third grade. State officials estimated last fall Tennessee third-graders will experience 50% learning loss in reading proficiency because of pandemic-related school closures.

NORTH CAROLINA

New federal rules require hospitals to make their health care prices public, and North Carolina Treasurer Dale Folwell called on the state's hospitals to do so. Folwell said the new transparency would increase health care's affordability and quality.

SOUTH CAROLINA

Gov. Henry McMaster announced he is allocating $19.9 million in federal COVID-19 relief funds for education programing for foster children, expanded day programs and summer school for early childhood education, and career and technical education programs in South Carolina’s state technical college system. The South Carolina Supreme Court struck down the governor's previous attempt to use the funding to enable families with pandemic-related financial hardships to keep their children in private schools.

ILLINOIS

Gov. J.B. Pritzker was all smiles about Georgia’s U.S. Senate election results Wednesday, saying he’s optimistic the federal government will come through with more state aid now that Republicans can’t block it. “I’m thrilled about the fact that the Senate changed hands,” he said. “As far as how that will affect the state of Illinois, I think there are two things that we can all immediately point to. One is that I think we will begin to see serious consideration of state and local funding, finally, because Mitch McConnell won’t be able to block it, and there are Republican senators whose states need state and local funding and they were working on that behind the scenes but Mitch McConnell would not bring that to a vote.”

Pritzker said Wednesday it could be difficult to address the state's out-of-balance budget during the short lame-duck legislative session that started Friday to wrap up the 101st General Assembly. State Rep. Mike Zalewski, D-Riverside, said thanks to last month’s federal stimulus bill, there may be some cushion to get to the next General Assembly that begins work Wednesday. Zalewski also said the governor’s announced $711 million in cuts will help bridge to the new legislature.

MICHIGAN

Michigan business and political leaders are pondering why Gov. Gretchen Whitmer chose to veto a bipartisan effort to allocate $220 million for Michigan’s Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund. The leaders note Whitmer’s shutdown orders are responsible for putting people out of work, but also have made it extremely difficult for out-of-work Michiganders to receive unemployment benefits.

Whitmer also declined to sign two bills into law, exercising a "pocket veto" on legislation that would have given a tax break to Meijer and allowed businesses hit hard by COVID-19 to defer summer 2020 property taxes. Critics assert the governor’s move further distorts the state’s tax code by favoring certain businesses over another.

WISCONSIN

Kenosha County District Attorney Michael Graveley announced the officers involved in Jacob Blake’s shooting last summer will not be charged with any crimes. Blake also will not face any criminal charges. In other legal news, the FBI and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration are joining Grafton police in looking into why an employee at the Aurora Health Clinic intentionally spoiled more than 500 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine.

MINNESOTA

The Minnesota Automobile Dealers Association (MADA) filed a federal lawsuit aiming to stop Gov. Tim Walz’s administration from adopting California’s vehicle emission standards. MADA, which represents 350 franchised new car dealers with more than 20,000 employees, claims Minnesota lacks the authority under the Federal Clean Air Act to regulate motor vehicle emissions.

NEW YORK

Much of the discussion of policies that might be coming out of Washington over the next few years has focused on President-elect Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. But now that Democrats will control the U.S. Senate, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York is poised to become majority leader – the first from the Empire State in that role. The Brooklyn politician has served as a lawmaker since he served in the state Assembly in the 1970s and was one of the first prominent voices to call for President Donald Trump’s removal after Wednesday's events at the U.S. Capitol.

NEW JERSEY

Republican lawmakers are hoping there’s sufficient appetite among their Democratic colleagues to override Gov. Phil Murphy’s veto of a bill that passed unanimously through both the Assembly and Senate. The legislation in question aims to help restaurants and taverns struggling through the pandemic by allowing them to expand outdoor seating beyond what current regulations allow. Murphy argued it would circumvent licensing rules critical to “the public’s health and safety.” GOP lawmakers are circulating a letter seeking a veto override vote as soon as possible.

PENNSYLVANIA

The question of whether it’s safe for school-age children to be in school has been a tough one to answer during the coronavirus pandemic, with deeply held beliefs on both sides of the argument. Now, 10 months into the COVID-19 crisis, the Pennsylvania Department of Education is trying to chart a middle course by allowing elementary school children to return to in-person learning, as of Jan. 25, if local school officials decide to reopen their buildings. Middle and high school students, however, must continue their studies from home, acting Education Secretary Noe Ortega said.

OHIO

After receiving encouragement from Ohio prosecutors to veto Ohio’s new Stand Your Ground legislation and a week after hinting he might do just that, Gov. Mike DeWine signed the bill last week. DeWine wants something in return, however. For more than a year, the Republican governor pushed his plan for tighter gun controls, but the General Assembly has yet to move anything forward. DeWine hopes signing the new bill leads to more cooperation with lawmakers.

INDIANA

Republican U.S. Sen. Todd Young released a statement Wednesday just before the joint session of Congress that said he will not join other senators in objecting to Electoral College votes from up to six states, saying he believes Congress has “no authority” to do anything other than certify the votes.

KENTUCKY

Survey results released by the Kentucky Democratic Party last week show Gov. Andy Beshear has strong statewide support, but Republicans expressed skepticism about the poll. Overall, the poll showed voters support the Democratic governor by a 59% to 37% margin, including 55% of independent voters and one-third of people who voted for Trump in November. Those numbers prompted a couple of GOP officials and consultants to scoff at the findings. “I can make a poll say people loved Wonder Woman 84 if you pay me to ...,” tweeted Tres Watson, a Republican campaign and communications consultant.

IOWA

In the week since Iowa’s in-person registration requirement expired, at least three new online operators have opened sportsbooks in the state. Rush Street Interactive (RSI), BetMGM and PointsBet are among online sportsbook operators inviting Iowans to register remotely to place bets on their websites now that Iowa bettors no longer have to first visit one of the state’s 19 retail casinos to verify their identification and open an account.

MISSOURI

As providers ramp up resources to deliver millions of shots into millions of arms in the coming months, Missouri lawmakers will consider allowing dentists to inoculate patients to expedite COVID-19 vaccinations this winter and spring. House Bill 628, sponsored by Rep. Danny Busick, R-Newtown, would make Missouri the fifth state to allow dentists to vaccinate patients for the virus.

TEXAS

Many counties in Texas have imposed a new round of COVID-19-related economic shutdowns, citing executive orders still in place from Gov. Greg Abbott. In September and October, Abbott issued additional executive orders to expand capacity limits for many businesses to 75%. The affected businesses included gyms, restaurants and retail stores and some bars. In the orders, the ability to expand capacity was dependent upon the number of COVID-19 patients admitted to a hospital in a given area.

COLORADO

Researchers and public health officials are using Colorado’s wastewater system to understand the prevalence and transmission of COVID-19 throughout the state. The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment said studying detectable COVID-19 particles in wastewater systems helps public health officials “improve our understanding of the number of individuals affected by COVID-19, including individuals who do not have symptoms or do not undergo testing.” The department has partnered with researchers from Colorado State University, Metropolitan State University, GT Molecular and Colorado wastewater utilities to conduct a study and publish a dashboard tracking COVID-19 wastewater data.

ARIZONA

Arizona’s COVID-19 cases spiked the week after Thanksgiving, something the state's top doctor blamed on local family gatherings. Seeing the same after the December holiday week, The Center Square reached out to data firm Cuebiq to find out just how many out-of-state visitors came to Arizona, thinking that could have been a factor, rather than just locals seeing family. The data was striking. An estimated 1.38 million people, mostly from locked-down California, visited Arizona in the last two weeks of 2020, 86% of which did not quarantine. We asked state officials whether they thought these tourists could be the cause, rather than residents. They’ve yet to respond.

WASHINGTON/OREGON

Washington and Oregon have joined with over a dozen indigenous tribes in a lawsuit against the federal government to stop the sale of the Seattle National Archives building, which houses thousands of paper files related to tribal treaty documents, ancestral records and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. The records will be sent to two separate National Archives sites in Kansas City, Mo., and Riverside, Calif. The lawsuit claims the building's expedited sale is illegal based on its relation to "agriculture, recreational, and conservation programs," and alleges the federal government did not seek testimony from tribal governments and other stakeholders.

OREGON

The same day Trump supporters breached the U.S. Capitol, a pro-Trump protest descended into an "unlawful assembly" after groups clashed and several people were injured. As Trump supporters moved in for a shouting match with counter-protesters, which included a number of uniformed anti-fascists, the two groups converged at the Capitol building. Officers spent 20 minutes pushing heavily armed Proud Boys and Trump supporters out of the area as counter-protesters dispersed.

Chris Krug is publisher of The Center Square. Regional editors J.D. Davidson, Derek Draplin, Cole Lauterbach, Delphine Luneau, Brett Rowland, Jason Schaumburg and Bruce Walker contributed to the column.

All who issued these statements need to do better and hold accountable the only person responsible for the shooting of Jacob Blake: Jacob Blake. On...

(The Center Square) – Vice President Mike Pence presided over the resumption of proceedings in the U.S. Senate on Wednesday evening, several hours after the violent incursion by protesters supporting President Donald Trump.

The House of Representatives and the Senate were meeting separately Wednesday afternoon to consider a challenge to Arizona’s electoral vote results when they were forced out of their respective chambers as protesters stormed the building.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., told journalists Wednesday evening that his understanding is that there would be no further objections to the election results in the wake of the afternoon's violence.

By about 5 p.m. EST, the Capitol building reportedly had been cleared of those who had forced their way in. About 90 minutes later, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced lawmakers would reconvene to confirm the results of the Electoral College and declare President-elect Joe Biden to be the next president.

“[A]fter calls to the Pentagon, the Justice Department and the Vice President, we have decided we should proceed tonight at the Capitol once it is cleared for use,” Pelosi said in a statement.

Pelosi, a California Democrat, noted legislators already had prepared to work late into the night to accommodate the anticipated challenges to the slates of electors for six states. If a representative and a senator each sign on to challenge a given state’s results, the two chambers are obliged to exit the joint session called to ratify the results and go to their respective chambers for up to two hours of debate.

Only if both chambers agree to uphold a challenge would the electors for a state be thrown out, an unlikely prospect with Democrats controlling the House and eager to see their party’s nominee inaugurated Jan. 20.

If Paul's prediction that the expected challenges would not come to pass in the aftermath of the assault on the Capitol comes true, lawmakers should be able to move through recording the remaining electoral votes without much in the way of drama or spectacle.

Pelosi blamed Trump for the violence at the Capitol, saying it was “anointed at the highest level of government.”

“We now will be part of history, as such a shameful picture of our country was put out to the world, instigated at the highest level,” she said.

(The Center Square) – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Congress would resume its joint session Wednesday night as soon as lawmakers are given the all-clear to do so after the violent incursion by protesters supporting President Donald Trump.

House Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said the session was expected to resume at 8 p.m. EST.

The House of Representatives and the Senate were meeting separately Wednesday afternoon to consider a challenge to Arizona’s electoral vote results when they were forced out of their respective chambers as protesters stormed the building.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., told journalists Wednesday evening that his understanding is that there would be no further objections to the election results in the wake of the afternoon's violence.

By about 5 p.m. EST, the Capitol building reportedly had been cleared of those who had forced their way in. About 90 minutes later, Pelosi announced lawmakers would reconvene to confirm the results of the Electoral College and declare President-elect Joe Biden to be the next president.

“[A]fter calls to the Pentagon, the Justice Department and the Vice President, we have decided we should proceed tonight at the Capitol once it is cleared for use,” Pelosi said in a statement.

Pelosi, a California Democrat, noted legislators already had prepared to work late into the night to accommodate the anticipated challenges to the slates of electors for six states. If a representative and a senator each sign on to challenge a given state’s results, the two chambers are obliged to exit the joint session called to ratify the results and go to their respective chambers for up to two hours of debate.

Only if both chambers agree to uphold a challenge would the electors for a state be thrown out, an unlikely prospect with Democrats controlling the House and eager to see their party’s nominee inaugurated Jan. 20.

If Paul's prediction that the expected challenges would not come to pass in the aftermath of the assault on the Capitol comes true, lawmakers should be able to move through recording the remaining electoral votes without much in the way of drama or spectacle.

Pelosi blamed Trump for the violence at the Capitol, saying it was “anointed at the highest level of government.”

“We now will be part of history, as such a shameful picture of our country was put out to the world, instigated at the highest level,” she said.

The Wisconsin Right Now awards are here. Here's who we think did the right thing in 2020. We define winners as people or groups who...

(The Center Square) – The fate of which party holds power in the U.S. Senate for the next two years is in the hands of Georgia voters.

Heading into the next session of Congress, Republicans hold a 50-48 advantage over Democrats with Tuesday's U.S. Senate runoff elections looming in Georgia.

Republican incumbent U.S. Sen. David Perdue faces Democrat challenger Jon Ossoff, and Republican incumbent U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler is being challenged by Democrat Raphael Warnock. The runoff elections materialized after no candidate in either race garnered a majority of the vote in November's general election.

If Republicans win one or both of the elections, the GOP will retain control in the U.S. Senate. If Democrats win both elections, the chamber will be split, 50-50, with Democrat and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris holding the tiebreaker vote.

"We've got a job to do here in Georgia," Loeffler told supporters at a recent campaign rally. "America is counting on us. If you vote, we will win. If you don't, we will lose America."

"This election is about the difference that we can make in our lives when we elect people who care about the people more than they care about themselves," Ossoff said.

Perdue, who won 49.73% of the vote to Ossoff's 47.95% in the general election, was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2014. Before winning public office, Perdue was in business, and his previous jobs included serving as CEO at Reebok, Dollar General and Pillowtex.

Ossoff, an investigative journalist and media executive, ran for Congress in 2017 in the special election for Georgia's 6th Congressional District.

Loeffler and Warnock emerged from a pack of 21 candidates in the general election, where Warnock won 32.9% of the vote compared with Loeffler's 25.91%.

Gov. Brian Kemp appointed Loeffler, a businesswoman and co-owner of Atlanta's WNBA franchise, in December 2019 to fill the seat vacated by former Sen. Johnny Isakson, who retired.

Warnock is senior pastor of the Atlanta church where Martin Luther King Jr. preached.

The circus surrounding Georgia's presidential election and Perdue and Loeffler's support for President Donald Trump have dominated the conversation regarding the runoff elections, pushing policy to the background.

Perdue and Loeffler have framed the runoff elections as saving America versus radical socialism.

Perdue has said an Ossoff victory would lead to illegal immigrants voting, police being defunded, higher taxes, private health insurance being taken away, small businesses going out of business and the U.S. Supreme Court being packed.

Republicans need to win the two Senate seats "to protect everything that Donald Trump accomplished in these first four years," Perdue said.

Ossoff has attacked Perdue for his stock dealings in the aftermath of learning about COVID-19 and his opposition of Medicaid expansion, which Ossoff said would help keep rural hospitals afloat and make health care more affordable.

"We've lost nine rural hospitals in 10 years here in Georgia," Ossoff told supporters at a recent campaign rally. "Where's David Perdue been? While the people are forced to move hours across the state just to get to the emergency room. That's not right."

Loeffler has painted Warnock as a radical liberal and Marxist who "wants to raise taxes, socialize health care, rip away our rights, and crush our economy with the Green New Deal." She has attacked Warnock for failing to support law enforcement.

"Violent crime in Atlanta is the highest it’s been in 20 YEARS – yet [Warnock and Ossoff] are totally silent," Loeffler tweeted. "By refusing to stand with law enforcement – and instead supporting defunding the police – they’re enabling the violence."

Warnock also has questioned Loeffler's stock trades after a senators-only briefing in January regarding the coronavirus, and he said Loeffler helped stall a second round of coronavirus aid for Americans for nine months.

"[Loeffler] made her priorities clear when she sold $3 million of her own stock, called unemployment relief 'counterproductive,' and stalled relief for nine months," Warnock tweeted. "Georgians learned long ago they can't trust Kelly Loeffler to look out for anyone but herself."

Wisconsin Right Now's first annual wall of shame awards are here: Who are the top 30 LOSERS of 2020? Yes, sadly, there were a lot...

(The Center Square) – U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, sued Vice President Mike Pence in an attempt to challenge the results of some states’ Electoral College votes.

Another attempt is being made by U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Alabama, who says he and “dozens” of House members plan to challenge some of the Electoral College votes on Jan. 6 when the Joint Session of Congress meets to certify the votes and ratify the president-elect.

Gohmert’s lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Tyler Division, asks a federal judge to give Pence “exclusive authority” to decide which Electoral College votes should be counted. Eleven others joined the lawsuit, including Republican electors from Arizona.

The lawsuit argues that Section 15 of the 1887 Electoral Count Act, which established procedures for determining which of two or more competing slates of presidential electors for a given state are to be counted in the Electoral College, or how objections to a proffered slate are adjudicated, violates the Electors Clause and the Twelfth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Section 15 designates the vice president, acting as the president of the Senate and presiding officer of the Joint Session of Congress, to “count the electoral votes for a state that have been appointed in violation of the Electors Clause.”

It also “limits or eliminates his exclusive authority and sole discretion under the Twelfth Amendment to determine which slates of electors for a State, or neither, may be counted; and replaces the Twelfth Amendment’s dispute resolution procedure – under which the House of Representatives has sole authority to choose the President,” the complaint states.

“Section 15 of the Electoral Count Act unconstitutionally violates the Electors Clause by usurping the exclusive and plenary authority of State Legislatures to determine the manner of appointing Presidential Electors, and instead gives that authority to the State’s Executive. Similarly, 3 USC § 5 makes clear that the Presidential electors of a state and their appointment by the State Executive shall be conclusive,” the complaint states.

Gohmert is asking the judge to determine if Pence is subject solely to the requirements of the Twelfth Amendment, in his capacity as president of the Senate and presiding officer of the Joint Session of Congress, to on Jan. 6 “exercise the exclusive authority and sole discretion in determining which electoral votes to count for a given State, and must ignore and may not rely on any provisions of the Electoral Count Act that would limit his exclusive authority and his sole discretion to determine the count, which could include votes from the slates of Republican electors from the Contested States,” the complaint states.

Steven Vladeck, professor of law at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law, debunked Gohmert’s lawsuit. One day later, he tweeted, “If the Twelfth Amendment somehow gave the Vice President the power to unilaterally throw out electoral votes for the other guy in favor of their own party (and even themselves), one might think that one of them would’ve noticed by now.”

Neither the White House nor the Vice President’s Office has issued a statement on the lawsuit.

GOP-selected electors cast votes in several states for Trump in which lawsuits alleging election fraud are ongoing. Electoral College votes certified by state governors or other state officials finalized Dec. 14 gave former Vice President Joe Biden 306 votes, and Trump, 232.

Gohmert says he’s joining Rep. Brooks’ challenge. Brooks told Fox News, “There are dozens in the House of Representatives who have reached that conclusion, as I have; we’re going to sponsor and co-sponsor objections to the Electoral College vote returns.”

The objection requires at least one member of the House and one member of the Senate to object in writing on Jan. 6. Next, a two-hour debate would occur, followed by each chamber voting.

Sen.-elect Tommy Tuberville, R-Alabama, indicated he would be open to objecting, Forbes reported. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, also left the door open, saying he would let the legal process play out. According to Politico, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, has also left the door open to challenge the votes.

Senate Majority Whip John Thune, R-Kansas, says the challenge effort is doomed to fail regardless of who objects. In order to throw out any Electoral College votes, the U.S. Constitution requires a majority vote cast in both the House and the Senate for each of the states’ votes in question. Neither chamber has a majority of votes.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Illinois, said Brooks’ effort is “a scam.”

Earlier this year, President Donald Trump's often embattled Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, established new rules on handling sexual assaults on campus to strengthen protections...