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If they take back the House, they'll rerun the same play they've used before.

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Less than a year ago, Iowa and New Hampshire appeared poised to lose their privileged places on the Democratic Party’s presidential primary calendar.

But Democrats, including in the White House, suddenly have more pressing problems. And as party leaders gathered in recent days for year-end meetings here, interest in what was once a red-hot effort to overhaul the order of the early nominating states had all but vanished.

Interviews with more than two dozen Democratic National Committee members, state party chairs and strategists laid bare widespread desire to avoid a divisive, intraparty dispute in 2022 — and skepticism that any change enacted after the midterm elections could be done in time for the next presidential campaign.

“I think it’s going to stay the same,” said Colmon Elridge, the chair of the Kentucky Democratic Party. “The energy that was around tinkering with the calendar. … It hasn’t come up a lot, but when it does, it’s, ‘We’re not there anymore.’”

On the sidelines of the South Carolina meetings, one Democratic strategist said “there’s no energy for it,” while a DNC member who closely follows the calendar process asked, “Why not kick the can down the road to ’28, when you’re presumably going to have an open White House?”

Iowa, he said, “may still be f---ed. The real question is whether it’s f---ed in 2024 or 2028.”

Iowa and New Hampshire, after fending off challenges to their one-two order in the primary calendar for years, appeared especially vulnerable following the 2020 election. The two heavily white states were derided as insufficiently representative of the Democratic Party’s diverse electorate, while Iowa’s caucuses were marred by delayed results and calculation errors. The eventual nominee, Joe Biden, lost both states badly, further straining their claims to privileged status.

In June, Nevada’s Democratic governor, Steve Sisolak, signed legislation to move Nevada’s 2024 nominating contest ahead of Iowa and New Hampshire, while Democrats in Washington considered, among other potential overhauls, rotating early primary states, hosting regional primaries or holding multiple early state primaries on the same day.

Any of those outcomes are still possible. The White House will have enormous influence on setting the calendar, and if Biden calls for a change, one almost certainly will be adopted. But the Biden administration has not yet weighed in, and DNC members appear far less motivated than they had once been to make an immediate change.

“I just don’t know if we’re at the point to have that discussion,” said Yvette Lewis, chair of the Maryland Democratic Party.

Amid a resurgent coronavirus pandemic and with Democrats still laboring to pass major pieces of Biden’s legislative agenda, she said, “Let’s deal with the issues at hand.”

The party’s waning appetite for a calendar change is reflective of its defensive posture heading into the midterm election year. DNC members are expected as early as next month to begin discussing the 2024 order of states. But many Democratic officials are fearful of doing anything more to project a disunified front as they scramble to maintain their Senate majority and limit losses in the House. Without a strong push from the White House, which did not respond to a request for comment for this story, many Democrats think sheer inertia will keep things as they are.

There are politically expedient reasons for Democrats to take a pass on altering the calendar in 2024. Biden has said he plans to run for reelection, almost certainly rendering the Democratic primary non-competitive. Since Republicans will have an open primary — and appear committed to following the traditional calendar — some Democrats fear pulling out of Iowa in 2024 would inhibit their ability to bracket GOP events in the state, ceding media attention entirely to the Republican field.

In addition, multiple state party chairs said they are hesitant to enact any calendar changes before the midterm elections that could upset activists in New Hampshire, where Democrats are defending the Senate seat held by Maggie Hassan. And Nevada Democrats may have hurt their case for moving up in the process after the state party erupted this year in a feud between pro-Bernie Sanders Democrats and allies of former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Even if there is “a lot of merit in shaking things up,” said Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, “We are focused on [Biden’s legislative agenda] and getting our Democrats elected.”

If the party does pursue a calendar change, she suggested “listening sessions” with Democrats throughout the country beforehand. Still, she asked, “Do we want to open the Pandora’s box?”

In Nevada, which traditionally follows Iowa and New Hampshire in the primary process, Judith Whitmer, the state party chair, said she is “definitely lobbying” for her state to go first in 2024, while party officials in South Carolina, the fourth early primary state, said they are not actively mounting an effort to move up, deferring to the DNC chair, Jaime Harrison (a former South Carolina chair himself), and the DNC.

Iowa and New Hampshire, meanwhile, are keeping their heads down.

At the South Carolina meetings last week, Ray Buckley, chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, dismissed a question about the primary order, saying, “Why would I want to stir that pot?” The New Hampshire secretary of state, Bill Gardner, said simply, “Our tradition will continue.”

“Status quo is good for us,” said Jeff Link, a longtime Democratic consultant based in Iowa. “There have been threats of varying degrees since the ‘80s, and usually what happens is right after a caucus there’s a lot of energy to do something different, and then the reality sets in that then you have to get 49 states to agree on what the alternative is, and that becomes difficult, and it’s harder to change it than it is to leave it as it is.”

If the DNC does adopt a change, it’s unlikely the matter will be settled. Gardner has vowed to follow a state law requiring New Hampshire to hold its primary before any “similar election” in another state, while Dave Nagle, a former congressman and former Iowa state Democratic Party chair, said “Iowa’s going to go first, even if we have to [hold caucuses] in 2022, even if it’s a non-sanctioned process.”

The DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee could begin discussing the calendar at its next meeting, in late January, though no decision is expected until later in the year.

Jay Parmley, the executive director of the Democratic Party in South Carolina, which hosts the nation’s first in the South primary, said he expects there will be a “robust discussion.”

Reid and South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn — both highly influential party leaders — have argued that Iowa and New Hampshire should not play such a prominent role in the primary. Neither state factored in Biden’s victory in 2020. He finished fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire before going on to win the nomination.

"I think there have been some other priorities for the president — to me that’s the major explanation for why they haven’t had the time to focus on it," said former DNC chair Tom Perez, who is currently running for governor of Maryland.

Perez, who has long been critical of Iowa and New Hampshire’s favored status, said that despite the delays, he believes the 2024 calendar will ultimately be changed by the beginning of 2023. "I’m pretty confident there will be movement on the order of the primaries. I would be stunned if Iowa is still first," he said, also noting he'd spoken to Reid several times about Nevada's place in the calendar.

One state party chair acknowledged that after the 2020 primary, there remains “a lot” of demand among party officials for a new order of primary states. But the same party chair said there may be more interest in enacting a change in 2028 than in 2024.

In South Carolina, Parmley said, “There’s always a great interest to shake it up.”

But he added, “It’s harder to do than everybody thinks. It’s politically difficult. … Sometimes we all get in a hubbub or a whole big situation, and the weight of it all, it just collapses.”

Moderate Democrats have new ammo against Manchin's effort to tank Build Back Better.

Sometimes research comes in what feels like the aftermath of a truth a community—especially a marginalized community—already knows and accepts. That doesn’t mean the science is any less important, of course, especially when we’re still in the stages of appealing to folks who don’t understand or relate to the issue at hand. One recent example? A study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health on Tuesday, Dec. 10 finds that trans and nonbinary youth who receive gender-affirming health care—specifically in the form of gender-affirming hormonal therapy—have significantly lower rates of not only depression but also suicidal ideation and suicide attempts. In short: It’s literally lifesaving.

The study is the first of its kind in that it has a large number of participants, coming in at more than 34,000 LGBTQ+ youth in the United States. Of these respondents, about 12,000 identified as either transgender or nonbinary. All respondents were between the ages of 23 and 24 and were polled between October and December of 2020. 

As some background, studies have already shown that transgender and nonbinary youth have a higher risk for suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, and depression when compared to both their cisgender, heterosexual peers and cisgender queer people. This is a big part of the reason the ongoing Republican effort to isolate trans youth from community spaces, like sports teams and even bathrooms, is so sick and harmful. We also know that trans youth are more likely to leave high school without a diploma, become homeless, and experience harassment and abuse.

This study found that for trans and nonbinary minors (meaning people below the age of 18), receiving hormonal therapy was associated with a close to 40% drop in odds of having a suicide attempt in the past year. That’s a huge, and again, lifesaving, difference. Even for folks above the age of 18, the study found that people receiving said hormonal therapy reported a lower likelihood of suicidal ideation and depression when compared to youth who wanted the treatment but couldn’t get it. 

In the study, 50% of all transgender and nonbinary young people said they were not receiving gender-affirming hormone therapy, but wanted to be, whereas 14% said they were receiving hormonal therapy. Just over one-third of respondents, at 36%, said they weren’t interested in receiving hormones. Mind you, someone’s gender identity never depends on medical intervention (like hormones) and is entirely valid either way.

Transgender and nonbinary youth of color reported lower rates of being able to access hormonal therapy when compared to white trans youth who sought it out. People living in the South also had low rates of being able to access such therapies. It’s impossible to consider this reality without thinking about the slew of anti-trans bills that have cropped up in the South that target both patients and physicians when it comes to providing gender-affirming, safe, age-appropriate medical care. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the study also finds that affirming parents are a big part of youth being able to access such care. Less than 4% of respondents under the age of 18 were able to access gender-affirming hormones without parental support. On the other hand, almost 80% of minors who did access such therapy said they had at least one parent on their side. 

On Feb. 25, 2020 Nancy Messonier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, gave a somber warning of what lay ahead. Americans, said Dr. Messonier, should expect “disruption to everyday life may be severe.“ She explained that, after looking at the information then available on the novel coronavirus pandemic spreading from China, that she had sat down and held a talk with her own family. “Ultimately, we expect we will see community spread in this country. It’s not so much a question of if this will happen any more, but rather more exactly when this will happen, and how many people in this country will have severe illness.” Two days later, Dr. Messonier was instructed to stop giving press conferences, and essentially sidelined from the handling of the  pandemic.

That Donald Trump downplayed the threat represented by COVID-19 and attempted to suppress information related to the scope of the danger, is not exactly a surprise. Whether it was Trump’s claim that there were only 15 cases in the U.S. and that it would soon be down to zero, or the ridicule directed at both scientists and politicians who attempted to be honest with the public, Trump’s actions generated tens of thousands and eventually hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths. In November, documents were released showing some of the ways Trump and his team worked to silence scientists, hide the recommendations from the CDC and other agencies, and block release of information such as the importance of wearing masks. 

And now the House Oversight Committee is back, with an extensive report that compiles both errors and deliberate suppression of the facts. That report shows that Trump was responsible for both “critical failures” and, in what should be the first step in a criminal indictment, "deliberate efforts to undermine the nation's coronavirus response for political purposes,"

Every politician is a position of power is called on to make decisions that can affect lives. Whether that represents a small number of soldiers being tasked with a risky mission, or funds being allocated to repair a bridge crossed by thousands of commuters each day, those decisions can have the most severe consequences.

In the course of events, the pushback against those in charge is generally limited to the political: Make a bad decision, and the threat is losing your seat in the next election. Forcing politicians to stand in front of a court for something they did in office—if that something was not an actual crime, like bribery or extortion—is a genuinely rare event. And it should be. 

But what Trump did over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic goes beyond bad decision-making, or even the ugly politics of retribution. We’ve known since last year that Trump’s team repeatedly took actions, not to prevent infections, but to deliberately increase them. We already know that 

• HHS political appointee Paul Alexander demanded that CDC stop publishing scientific reports he believed were damaging to Trump. CDC officials were then ordered to delete Alexander’s emails to cover up this attempt to quash vital public data.  
• Dr, Deborah Birx has confirmed that quack Dr. Scott Atlas was brought into the COVID-19 team specifically to reduce the level of testing across the nation, generating a false impression that case loads were falling.

The new report also shows that Trump’s team did with COVID-19 what they did with every other project while he was in charge: opened it up to corruption and “left the federal government vulnerable to fraud and profiteering.”

How Donald Trump managed the COVID-19 crisis wasn’t a litany of errors. It wasn’t even just a cascade of crimes. It was an attempted genocide, one in which Trump repeatedly took actions designed to cause more deaths out of a mistaken impression that those deaths would mostly affect urban areas in blue states. They didn’t just commit a crime against humanity, they knew it, because they devoted resources to trying to cover up that crime.

What Trump did leading up to Jan. 6 is unforgivable and deserves criminal prosecution. What he did in handling COVID-19 is far worse.

One of the most alarming things about a recent Dallas Morning News analysis of how Texas’ state prison and jail populations factor into redistricting lies in a brief paragraph under the “corrections” section. The paper does a stunning job of illustrating how, by counting incarcerated people as residents of the prisons they’re detained in, Texas Republicans have been able to amass even more power. But it’s the last two sentences of this corrections paragraph that truly stand out: “Additionally, a previous version of this story stated that 29 House districts might need to be redrawn if prisoners were not counted. In fact, that number is 35; the corresponding chart has been updated accordingly.”

This correction and the Dallas Morning News’ ensuing report shows that over 23% of the state’s House districts are impacted by the way Texas counts those behind bars as voters. Incarcerated people make up less than 1% of Texas’ entire population, yet by counting them as residents at the places they’re locked up, lawmakers have fundamentally changed representation in the state. Incarcerated people account for 1 in 10 residents in 24 counties across the state, a majority of whom are represented by Republicans. Yet many are unable to vote and don’t plan on residing in the same area as where they’ve been incarcerated.

The state bars anyone convicted of a felony from casting a ballot while they are incarcerated, on parole, or on probation. Only once they’ve completed those terms will they be eligible to re-register to vote. That includes paying fines and fees tied to their incarceration. According to a 2019 study released by by Campaign Legal Center and Georgetown Law’s Civil Rights Clinic, unpaid fines and fees barred nearly 333,000 people from being able to vote in the 2016 election in Texas alone. Yet many areas with jails and prisons are reaping the benefits of a large population of incarcerated people despite their disenfranchisement.

The former mayor of Palestine, Texas, which is located in Anderson County, believes it’s only right that counties like his get something more out of their detainees. “They should be counted here. If Houston wants that fix, then build those [prison] units in Houston,” Steve Presley told the Dallas Morning News. Of the male state prisons located in Anderson County, more than 13,000 men are incarcerated, a majority of whom are either Black or Latino. Nearly half of Anderson County’s 11,430 Black residents are behind bars. This not only boosts the population of a rural area that has seen many residents move away but also boosts diversity. Incarcerated people alone make up 23% of Anderson County’s population.

So, what does that mean for redistricting? According to the Dallas Morning News, 46 of the 232 counties that voted for Trump in 2020 would shrink in population were incarcerated people not counted as residents, accounting for a loss of more than 104,000 people. If incarcerated people were to be counted as residents of where they actually live, Texas’ five largest counties would see a spike in population instead. Texas’ present redistricting maps dilutes power in metropolitan areas and boosts power in what the Dallas Morning News deemed “prison towns,” to say nothing of the way GOP lawmakers have disenfranchised voters of color. This has led to numerous lawsuits being filed against the state. An additional suit was filed last month on behalf of Damon James Wilson, who is incarcerated at William P. Clements Unit in Amarillo. In reality, he lives more than 350 miles away in Grand Prairie—and wants to be counted among the population at his home rather than where he’s being detained.

He’s not the only one hoping to dismantle Texas’ shameful practice of counting imprisoned people as residents based on where they’ve been incarcerated. State Rep. Jasmine Crockett told the Dallas Morning News she’s willing to fight prison gerrymandering not just in Texas but around the country. “I plan to pursue [this], federally,” Crockett said. “I don’t believe it should be a state-specific issue. It’s about doing things that are fair.” According to Prison Policy Initiative, just 11 states have ended prison gerrymandering. As alarming as Texas’ latest redistricting moves have been, it sadly isn’t the only state doing the wrong thing for those who are currently or have ever been incarcerated.

To most of us, Kanye West’s short-lived presidential run was just one more sideshow to the existing circus surrounding everything former President Donald Trump touched in 2020.

West was largely dismissed, and some even felt that perhaps he was going through a mental health crisis and tried to simply look the other way at much of what he said and did, dismissing it as symptoms of an illness.

But either way, it has come to light that West’s run as a supposed “independent” was in actuality funded by an underground group of Republican political operatives, according to The Daily Beast, and West’s campaign failed to report it. That could be a violation of federal laws. 

It’s not known if West was aware of his connection to GOP operatives or not.

At the center of the newfound documents is the law firm Holtzman Vogel, where Virginia state Sen. Jill Holtzman Vogel works as a managing partner. Holtzman played a prominent role in spreading allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 election. The firm is recognized as a “heavy hitter" for Republicans, according to Facing South. 

Holtzman Vogel represented Trump in his failed Pennsylvania lawsuit and was connected to the Honest Elections Project, a dark-money voter suppression group launched in February 2020.

Paul S. Ryan, vice president of government watchdog Common Cause, tells The Daily Beast the findings about West’s campaign are “a big deal.”

Is it really surprising to anyone that Georgia Senate candidate and Trump bootlicker Herschel Walker lied about graduating from college? When do Republicans ever play fair and speak the truth? I’m waiting …

But, big props to Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Greg Bluestein for pointing out something a lot of people didn’t: Walker’s camp has been propagating a myth all over the place. 

Thursday, the campaign finally scraped the reference that Walker “graduated from the University of Georgia with a Bachelor’s degree in Criminal Justice,” a lie found on his Amazon author site, his Speaker Booking Agency page, and his New Georgia Encyclopedia entry, AJC reported.

It was never supposed to take this long for Andrew Wiggins to become a valuable NBA player. Wiggins was the consensus No. 1 ranked prospect in his high school class, and he remained at the top even after he reclassified and went to college a year early. Before his sole season at Kansas even began, he was widely considered the eventual No. 1 overall pick, having drawn comparisons to LeBron James and Tracy McGrady and even being bestowed with the nickname “Maple Jordan.”

Pre-draft scouting reports raved about Wiggins’s defensive potential and otherworldly athleticism, often noting that the only thing standing between the explosive Canadian wing and eventual stardom was the development of a so-called killer instinct as a scorer, as the majority of his offensive production in college came on transition opportunities rather than in the half-court. Wiggins would be a plus defender right away, the theory went, allowing him time to work on his offensive game and grow into the star he would almost surely become.

Of course, that’s not how things worked out. Early in his rookie season, our own Neil Paine wrote that Wiggins’s statistical profile suggested a prospect who would end up closer in class to journeyman swingman James Posey than a superstar like LeBron — and Paine’s assessment ended up being prescient.

Wiggins was considerably better on offense than defense through his first few NBA seasons, and the one thing people were most concerned about — the ability to create his own shot — was arguably his only high-level skill. Wiggins was an extremely poor rebounder for his size and position, he rarely created opportunities for his teammates, he did not shoot efficiently from anywhere other than the immediate area around the rim, and he was routinely criticized for poor effort.

That criticism grew to the point that, before agreeing to offer Wiggins a five-year, $148 million maximum contract extension in 2017, Minnesota Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor wanted to meet with Wiggins to impress upon him that “there are some things that I need out of him, and that is the commitment to be a better player than you are today.” When the Wolves handed Wiggins that max extension anyway, it quickly became viewed as an albatross and one of the small handful of worst contracts in the NBA.

Then Wiggins was traded, along with a protected first-round pick and a second-round pick, to the Golden State Warriors in exchange for D’Angelo Russell, Jacob Evans and Omari Spellman. Ever since the trade — and this year in particular — Wiggins has been slowly but surely turning himself into a positive-value player. He’s still not the superstar he was billed as during his days as a prospect, but he’s become a valuable, two-way contributor to one of the best teams in the NBA.

Still only 26 years old, Wiggins is in the midst of his best NBA season by just about every measure. He’s averaging 18.4 points, 4.5 rebounds and 1.8 assists in 30.9 minutes a night. Those are modest numbers, but the context surrounding them matters. Wiggins is shooting a career-best 53.7 percent on 2-point shots, as well as a career-best 40.8 percent on threes while taking more than five of them per contest. The result is a career-best 59.0 percent true shooting percentage that is 6 percent better than the league’s average mark, making this the first time in his career that he’s added points with his shooting relative to what a league-average player would have produced. He’s not nearly his team’s top offensive option, but he’s carrying an above-average usage rate and scoring at a better-than-average clip. That’s extremely valuable, especially for a team as dependent on a supernova scoring option as the Warriors are on Stephen Curry.

Crucially, Wiggins is also coming closer than ever to fulfilling the defensive potential so many saw in him as a prospect. Among 192 players who have played 500 or more minutes this season, Wiggins has defended the 11th-toughest slate of opponents, according to the Bball-Index Matchup Difficulty metric. He has done quite well in those matchups, finally tapping into the size-length-strength-athleticism combination that made him such an appealing prospect in the first place. He’s garnering some early All-Defense buzz and has proven himself a key cog in what has so far been the NBA’s best defense by several points per 100 possessions.

Put all of this together and, in his eighth NBA season, Wiggins is finally painted as an above-average contributor by all-in-one metrics like Box Plus-Minus and win shares per 48 minutes. He also has a positive overall rating from RAPTOR for just the second time in his career and a positive rating on both offense and defense for the first time ever.

How rare is it for a player to take this long to develop into a net positive on both ends of the floor? There are 3,484 players who have played at least one minute in the NBA since 1985,²¹ according to our historical RAPTOR database. Of those players, only 556 recorded at least one season with a positive RAPTOR rating on both sides of the ball while playing at least 1,000 minutes per 82 team games. Among that group of 556, just 50²² did not post that first two-way positive season until at least their eighth year in the league.

The list runs the gamut of player archetypes. There are guards, wings and bigs, primary ball-handlers and defensive stoppers, three-and-D guys and enforcers. There are 20 former lottery picks, eight former top-5 picks and (including Wiggins) three former No. 1 overall picks, while there are also 10 second-round picks and six players who went undrafted.

Similarly, this is the first time that Wiggins’s total RAPTOR rating exceeds +1, meaning that he’s adding more than 1 point per 100 possessions to his team’s scoring margin when he’s on the floor. Shifting to this criteria allows us to capture players whose contributions leaned toward one end of the court rather than the other but still were large enough to make them clear-cut positives.

Again, there are only 50 players²³ who have taken until their eighth NBA season or later to post their first total RAPTOR rating of +1 or better. The list is slightly different than the one above, but it also contains a wide cross-section of player archetypes, including 18 lottery picks and six former top-5 selections, though Wiggins is the only former No. 1 overall pick to qualify.

Notably, Wiggins’s coach (Steve Kerr) appears on both lists, while one of his predecessors at small forward for the Warriors (Harrison Barnes) appears on the latter. Barnes was subjected to a similar volume of early career criticism²⁴ as Wiggins was, though that criticism was more about not living up to expectations than being a negative on-court force. Still, it took quite a while for Barnes to maximize himself within the complementary, three-and-D-style role he’s played since the moment he stepped on the court in the NBA, just as it took Wiggins a while to settle into that role at all.

Not every player is meant to be the top dog on his team — not even every player who was the consensus top prospect in his class and seemingly ticketed for that role from a young age. That Wiggins was hyped up as a LeBron, McGrady, Durant-style prospect is not necessarily his fault, but the hype — along with his outsized contract — surely influenced our collective perception of him over the years.

Freed from the responsibility and pressure of carrying the team on either end of the floor, Wiggins is instead doing his best to maximize the skills he does have and to fit in as a core piece of a team whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts. He’s not a generational player, but after all this time, he’s finally a good one. And that’s worth celebrating.

Neil Paine contributed research.

Check out our latest NBA predictions.

Liberals, don't give in to the temptation of schadenfreude when omicron sweeps through Red America.

The Senate’s parliamentarian has for the third time issued a nonbinding opinion against the inclusion of protections for millions of undocumented immigrants in President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda.

For months, legislators have steadily watered down provisions in order get a thumbs up from Elizabeth MacDonough, from a pathway to citizenship to temporary relief of up to 10 years. But on Thursday, she rejected the so-called Plan C anyway, despite precedent for passing immigration provisions through this process. The White House issued a statement slamming the opinion.

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“The decision by the parliamentarian is deeply disappointing and relegates millions to an uncertain and frightening future,” the White House said. “This president, this administration, and our partners on the Hill vehemently disagree with this decision and will keep fighting to give relief and protection to the many Dreamers, TPS holders, farm workers, and essential workers who are living in fear.”

“Time and time again they have shown they are valuable and contributing members of communities in every corner of America,” the statement continued. “Ultimately, it’s time for Congress to stop kicking the can down the road and finally provide certainty and stability to these groups, and make other badly needed reforms to our outdated immigration system. Fixing our immigration system is the smart and the right thing to do.”

That statement did not call for senators to overrule MacDonough, a Senate staffer who reportedly worked to deport immigrants when she served as a prosecutor roughly two decades ago, Latino Rebels reported last month. But many affected individuals and their advocates did.

“It’s unsurprising that the unelected parliamentarian continues to show her aversion to fulfilling the duties of her appointed role,” NAKASEC Action Fund digital organizer John Kim said in a joint statement with the UndocuBlack Network. “Fortunately, Vice President Harris can and must ignore the parliamentarian’s arbitrary opinions and include a pathway to citizenship in the federal budget package. Immigration passes the Byrd Rule and is therefore considered to be aptly included in the federal budget reconciliation. Democrats, stop hiding behind irrelevancies and pass a pathway to citizenship this year.”

In a second statement received by Daily Kos, United We Dream Action executive director Greisa Martinez Rosas said the organization is “unapologetic about calling on Senate Democrats to disregard the parliamentarian and to reject this anti-democratic, white supremacist roadblock that only serves to keep Black and brown, working class people, both undocumented and documented, from being included in monumental legislation. This is a fight about racial justice.”

United We Dream Action is among the groups planning to rally in Washington, D.C., Friday to urge Senate Democrats to overrule MacDonough. Lawmakers in the House issued a joint statement Thursday evening urging the same.

“We’ve said it before, and we will say it again: at this point, the Senate can—and must reinstate a pathway to citizenship in the Build Back Better Act, even if that means disregarding the Senate Parliamentarian and bringing that vote to the Senate floor,” Congressmen Lou Correa, Adriano Espaillat, and Chuy García said in a release received by Daily Kos. “History will take note of those who for so long have championed delivering for our communities, but have delivered nothing but inaction, empty promises, and dreams deferred.”

So what happens next? One option is for Democrats to allow an unelected adviser to stand in the way of promised relief for millions of undocumented families. Another option is for Democrats to use their majority and deliver.

In the days leading to MacDonough’s nonbinding advice, some Senate Democrats had been “signaling a new willingness” to overrule her, the Los Angeles Times reported. West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, of course, has remained opposed. On Friday, Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto signaled her support. “I think we should use the rules that we have. And if you're talking about sidestepping and disregarding her advice, yes, I would disregard her advice,” CQ Now reports she said. Also on Friday, Sen. Alex Padilla said “all options are on the table,” Latino Rebels reported.

“This is a helluva way to run a democracy. An unelected staff attorney in a supposedly non-political role makes yet another political decision to thwart the freedom and futures of millions of undocumented immigrants,” America’s Voice executive director Frank Sharry said. “What’s next? Disregard the parliamentarian’s advisory opinion? We’re for it. Develop other tactics and options to produce a breakthrough? We’re open to hearing them. But the onus is on Democrats to use their majority to keep their promise. We are not interested in excuses, we are interested in results.”

Georgia Republicans are already bracing for what they expect to be one of the state’s most bitter intra-party battles in modern memory. Two of their own—both generally well-liked and regarded—will spend the first half of 2022 shredding each other in the GOP gubernatorial primary, all because Donald Trump is a loser who can't handle the truth.

According to Axios, more than two dozen state lawmakers who saw the primary freight train coming their way made a desperate appeal last month to former Sen. David Perdue's better angels in order to avert the oncoming calamity.

In an undated letter, 25 GOP state senators thanked Perdue for his service and urged him to make another Senate bid after his runoff loss earlier this year, rather than challenge sitting Republican governor Brain Kemp for his seat. 

“We are asking you to join us in fully supporting and endorsing Governor Brian Kemp for reelection,” read the missive. “Our GOP and state must be unified behind our Governor with a positive message to keep Georgia conservative and moving forward.”

They signed off with an "open invitation" to discuss the matter in greater detail. The GOP state Senate caucus includes 34 Republicans, 31 of whom had already endorsed Kemp for reelection by September. The group of 25 reportedly fretted over the notion that their letter might leak, so they never distributed it electronically—like that would matter. It wasn't exactly genius.

But the worst of the episode was really how Perdue responded to their entreaty. He told Axios it was "funny" that the group believed they might be able to influence his decision. Then Perdue just openly mocked them.

“This is what career politicians do," he mused. "They think that endorsements among each other can elbow an outsider out of a race. ... People who vote don't care about that. You know who cares about that? Career politicians."

Frankly, Perdue couldn't get enough of it, calling the senators "ironic" and "ludicrous" for thinking he could "be moved one way or the other."

In response, one signee bristled at Perdue's characterization of the state senators being career politicians while counting himself an outsider.

“Most have been in office less than Perdue," responded state Sen. John Albers.

Another signatory, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mike Dugan, regretted Perdue's dismissive response.

"We hold Sen. Perdue in the highest regard and always will, and wish that he had responded to us in the same manner in which we originally engaged with him," Dugan said.

Well, that went over like a box of rocks. So much for Republican comity and a sense of shared destiny—it's all downhill from here for the Georgia State GOP.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft started shifting options from the Control Panel to the Settings app in Windows 8. The company has gradually moved settings away from the Control Panel since then. Quite a few options migrated over with the rollout of Windows 11, but a recent Insider build of Windows 11 moved a small handful of settings to the Settings app. Microsoft outlined the changes in the release notes of Windows 11 build 22509, which came out on December 1, 2021. The moves garnered attention from several outlets over the last week: 1. We have moved the advanced sharing settings (such as Network discovery, File and printer sharing, and public folder sharing) to a new page in Settings app under Advanced Network Settings. 2. We've made some updates to the device specific pages under Printers & Scanners in Settings to show more information about your printer or scanner directly in Settings when available. 3. Some of the entry points for network and devices settings in Control Panel will now redirect to the corresponding pages in Settings.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is familiar to most people, if at all, from the seal displayed at all banks proclaiming that your deposits are backed by FDIC insurance. The FDIC, however, doesn’t merely insure bank deposits. It is also a key bank regulator responsible for the safety-and-soundness of the banking system and enforcement of consumer protection laws.

The FDIC is currently in the throes of an internal power struggle. The immediate issue at the FDIC is about whether the agency is controlled by a majority of its board of directors or by its chair, Jelena McWilliams. All of the directors other than McWilliams are Joe Biden appointees; McWilliams is a Donald Trump holdover.

But what’s really at stake here is whether Democrats will allow Republicans to continue to stymie them through asymmetric political warfare. Biden must be prepared to fire McWilliams, despite the howls of outrage it would generate from the GOP; backing down would put his entire agenda at risk to Republican sabotage.

Historically, the FDIC operated collegially: although the chair presided over board meetings, the chair would allow free discussion and a vote on any item a director wished to have on the agenda. The current fracas arose when a board member sought to put an item — approval of a request for information about the process for evaluating bank mergers — on the board’s meeting agenda. The request for information is a preliminary step in reexamining how the FDIC approves bank mergers, which is part of Biden’s pro-competition agenda.

The board member’s request to put the item on the agenda is the sort of pro forma action that has always been approved by FDIC chairs in the past, even when they have not supported the item. But McWilliams broke faith with the agency’s tradition of collaborative engagement and refused to put the item on the agenda. Instead, McWilliams attempted to deep-six the request for information — and any reexamination of the bank merger process — by committing it to bureaucratic purgatory.

After McWilliam’s unprecedented departure from FDIC tradition, the board majority proceeded to put the request for information up for a vote without a meeting, as expressly permitted by FDIC bylaws. Even though a majority of the board voted in favor of issuing the request, McWilliams declared the vote invalid and forbade the FDIC staff from taking action on it.

Let’s be clear: McWilliams does not have a legal leg to stand on. The FDIC is structured as a government corporation, and the law provides that the management of the FDIC “shall be vested in a Board of Directors.” Nothing in federal statute or the FDIC’s bylaws gives the chair exclusive power to set meeting agendas, much less decide when a board vote is valid.

McWilliams all but admits this. In the course of the controversy, including in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, she has not once pointed to any legal authority for her position. Instead, her position stands solely on purported FDIC tradition. It has never been FDIC tradition, however, for a chair to refuse to put an item on the agenda, much less when asked to do so by a majority of the board.

Collegiality is a two-way street. After McWilliams refused to allow the FDIC to function according to its normal collegial procedures, she can hardly complain that the board majority decided to do things differently (although completely by the book). The FDIC is designed to function as a board democracy, in which majority rule controls, but McWilliams has recast the agency as a personal dictatorship, willfully ignoring the consequences of the 2020 election that gave Democrats a majority on the FDIC board.

The fight at the FDIC reflects a broader shift in the politics of financial regulation. Bank regulation used to be a clubby, boring world where partisanship was secondary. This collegial atmosphere was facilitated by bank regulatory agencies’ political independence from the White House.

The norm of agency independence, however, has been severely eroded in recent years by the GOP and its allies. Mick Mulvaney working double-duty as OMB director (serving at the pleasure of the president) and Acting CFPB director (nominally independent) showed that Republicans had little regard for the agency independence when it was inconvenient. Conservative majorities on the Supreme Court further undermined agency independence with decisions holding that the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency are removable at will by the president.

The new reality is that bank regulation is an ugly, partisan blood sport. Republicans have recognized and embraced this new reality. That’s the game McWilliams is playing with her disingenuous appeals to a selectively interpreted FDIC tradition as somehow controlling over unambiguous statutory language.

McWilliams is acting in bad faith. She knows that she merely needs to run the clock to prevail. Her term as chair formally extends until June 2023, but she can continue in the position until a successor is confirmed, something that is unlikely if Republicans retake the Senate in 2022. If McWilliams can unilaterally control the FDIC, as she claims, she can block Democrats’ initiatives on a range of financial regulatory matters for all of Biden’s current term.

The FDIC board majority could bring suit against McWilliams, but that will take months to reach a final resolution, and time is on McWilliams’ side. The alternative — and best — move is for Biden to fire McWilliams. The FDIC chair is removable “at will.” There is no statutory limitation of only “for cause” removal. Even if there were a “for cause” requirement, however, the president already has ample cause to fire McWilliams. The president is constitutionally required to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. McWilliams has failed to faithfully execute the law by refusing to acknowledge a valid vote by the majority of the board. To be sure, McWilliams could contest her removal in court, but she would be the one facing the uphill fight in that situation.

The real question in the FDIC power struggle is whether Democrats will continue to play by outmoded rules of engagement. If they do, they will lose, and Biden’s pro-competitive agenda will be stymied. The President might not want to spend political coin on the FDIC power struggle, but if he fails to do so, he will embolden Republicans in other agencies and in Congress to engage in further bad faith and illegal tactics.

Any hope of a détente or return to pre-Tea Party political norms — at the FDIC and more generally — requires Democrats to deploy the same hardball tactics as Republicans, so that there will be no advantage to either party. Unless McWilliams quickly backs down and commits to lawful governance, Biden should make clear that he understands the new rules of the game and fire her for her illegal administrative putsch.

This week, the families of 61 million children received their final payments under the expanded Child Tax Credit. This credit has kept 10 million children above the poverty line, but it is expiring as the Senate delays a vote to renew it through the Build Back Better Act.

Instead, on the same day these last payments went out, the Senate voted to approve a $778 billion military spending budget — four times as much as the annual cost of the entire Build Back Better plan. Yet we've heard endlessly about how it's Build Back Better that needs to be gutted so we can skimp and save.

During the worst public health and economic crisis in generations, Build Back Better could have called for at least $10 trillion over a decade. But unanimous opposition from Republicans, and a few Democrats, pushed the plan down first to $3.5 trillion — and now to just $1.7 trillion over 10 years. Even that lowest figure just squeaked by in the House and could face more cuts still in the Senate.

The smaller package means Medicare won’t cover dental care for seniors. It means no free community college. And it means deep cuts for child care and climate programs. Hearing care for seniors, paid family leave, immigrant protections and the Child Tax Credit could all still face additional cuts or be thrown out entirely.

But when it came to the largest peacetime military budget in history, all of that scrutiny disappeared. The most controversial parts of the 2,100-page military spending bill were negotiated behind closed doors and passed the House mere hours after it was made public, meaning members of Congress couldn’t possibly have read the whole thing before casting their votes.

Here are some comparisons between the military spending bill just passed, and the one senators like Sen. Joe Manchin say is too expensive.

— Congress is choosing to spend more on guarding the world’s oil supply (at least $81 billion a year) than on the Build Back Better proposal for fighting climate change ($55 billion a year).

— Congress is spending more on a single military contractor, Lockheed Martin ($75 billion last year), than on the Build Back Better proposal for preschool and child care ($40 billion a year).

— Congress has authorized spending an extra $25 billion next year on weapons the Pentagon didn’t even ask for, rather than the $20 billion a year Build Back Better proposal for poverty-busting tax credits for families and workers.

— Congress is choosing to spend more on Space Force ($17.5 billion next year), than on the Build Back Better proposal for health care for uninsured Americans ($13 billion a year).

— And finally, Congress is choosing to spend twice as much on military bases in Germany ($7.5 billion last year) than on the Build Back Better proposal for hearing benefits for seniors ($3.5 billion a year).

Who benefits from these choices?

The Build Back Better Act would reduce poverty and bring economic security to millions of children and workers. It would make child care affordable, create good jobs and invest in clean energy. And it would raise revenue through taxes on the wealthy and corporations.

Sky-high military spending, on the other hand, helps perpetuate a foreign policy that brought us 20 years of disastrous war while subsidizing military contractor CEOs and polluting the planet — all at tremendous taxpayer expense.

We’ve seen Congress’ willingness to spend money and we know that any supposed concerns about the cost of Build Back Better are distractions.

It’s time for Manchin, the main Democratic holdout, and the rest of our elected leaders to prioritize our lives and our democracy. It’s time to pass the Build Back Better Act and invest in our people, beginning with the 140 million poor and people with lower incomes in the nation — so we can get on with fighting this pandemic and its economic impacts, protecting our right to vote and all the other work this moment of crisis demands.

The only way to Build Back Better is to build back from the bottom up.

wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek: Security researchers at Google's Project Zero have picked apart one of the most notorious in-the-wild iPhone exploits and found a never-before-seen hacking roadmap that included a PDF file pretending to be a GIF image with a custom-coded virtual CPU built out of boolean pixel operations. If that makes you scratch your head, that was exactly the reaction from Google's premier security research team after disassembling the so-called FORCEDENTRY iMessage zero-click exploit used to plant NSO Group's Pegasus surveillance tool on iPhones. "We assess this to be one of the most technically sophisticated exploits we've ever seen," Google's Ian Beer and Samuel Grob wrote in a technical deep-dive into the remote code execution exploit that was captured during an in-the-wild attack on an activist in Saudi Arabia. In its breakdown, Project Zero said the exploit effectively created "a weapon against which there is no defense," noting that zero-click exploits work silently in the background and does not even require the target to click on a link or surf to a malicious website. "Short of not using a device, there is no way to prevent exploitation by a zero-click exploit," the research team said. The researchers confirmed the initial entry point for Pegasus was Apple's proprietary iMessage that ships by default on iPhones, iPads and macOS devices. By targeting iMessage, the NSO Group hackers needed only a phone number of an AppleID username to take aim and fire eavesdropping implants. Because iMessage has native support for GIF images (especially those that loop endlessly), Project Zero's researchers found that this expanded the attack surface and ended up being abused in an exploit cocktail that targeted a security defect in Apple's CoreGraphics PDF parser. Within Apple's CoreGraphics PDF parser, the NSO exploit writers abused Apple's implementation of the open-source JBIG2, a domain specific image codec designed to compress images where pixels can only be black or white. Describing the exploit as "pretty terrifying," Google said the NSO Group hackers effectively booby-trapped a PDF file, masquerading as a GIF image, with an encoded virtual CPU to start and run the exploit. Apple patched the exploit in September and filed a lawsuit seeking to hold NSO Group accountable.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New York City is phasing out gas in new buildings. It’s a milestone in the fight to clean up climate pollution.

On Wednesday, New York became the largest city in the country to agree to phase out fossil fuels in all new building construction after the city council passed a bill that bans those buildings from hooking up to gas. The “breakthrough moment,” according to council member Alicka Ampry-Samuel, spells the beginning of the end to gas-powered appliances used by default in construction.

Carbon emissions from buildings are a major driver of climate change, and the main culprits are boilers and water heaters, and to a lesser degree, gas stoves. In the US, 13 percent of greenhouse gasses come from commercial and residential buildings powered by fossil fuels. New York City’s buildings account for a much larger share of its emissions, more than transportation or any other category.

The appliances that run on gas — stoves, furnaces, boilers, and water heaters — also come at another cost. When natural gas combusts indoors, it releases a mix of particulate matter, nitrogen and sulfur oxides, and volatile organic compounds — air pollutants that harm respiratory and cardiovascular health.

With the new bill, New Yorkers can expect to see some changes by the end of 2023, when developers of new buildings under seven stories won’t be allowed to put in gas-powered stoves, boilers, or water heaters. Instead, these buildings will use electricity, relying on a mix of technologies like heat pumps and induction stoves to replace gas and oil.

Builders of larger structures like skyscrapers will have until 2027 before they have to scrap gas. And since the bill applies solely to the roughly 2,000 new buildings that go up in the city each year, it won’t address the gas and other fossil fuels burned in the city’s 1 million existing structures. (It’s politically harder and more expensive to renovate buildings years later than it is to build them with electric power from the start.)

Still, the ban is necessary for transitioning off of fossil fuels: Without it, the city’s building sector would be a main source of climate pollution for decades to come. And the bill’s advocates see it as a potential turning point in one of the most fraught national battles with the fossil fuel industry over the fate of the nation’s 70 million gas-powered buildings. “New York City is stepping up on one crucial aspect of fighting the climate crisis,” Pete Sikora, campaigns director for New York Communities for Change, a group that advocated for the bill. “This is the country’s global city sending a signal to the nation and the world to get off of fossil fuels.”

There’s a catch to electrification, however: You need an electric grid that runs on carbon-free power to completely eliminate the emissions from buildings. Right now, New York City gets most of its power from a local grid that gets 85 percent of its energy from fossil fuels. That grid is expected to rapidly transition to cleaner energy sources over the coming decade with the New York State law on the books charting a path to 70 percent clean electricity by 2030.

The climate fight to electrify buildings is still in its early stages, but cities across the nation are starting to take a hard look at their electrification options. The gas stove is one of the biggest symbols in this fight, because it’s one of the most visible reminders of how fossil fuels are integrated in many Americans’ daily lives. So if gas-guzzling New York is taking steps to tackle gas hookups, it could be the beginning of an end to Americans’ default way to cook and heat their homes.

NYC is the biggest battleground yet in a new war over building pollution

Climate activists have spent years ramping up to ambitious state-by-state campaigns to unhook the nation’s buildings from fossil fuels. In 2019, Berkeley became the first to change its building codes that effectively required all new construction to rely on electricity. Since then, dozens of cities, mostly on the West Coast, have followed Berkeley’s example.

Ampry-Samuel and others were inspired by those efforts in coming up with New York City’s gas-ban bill. A coalition of New York-based progressive groups, including WeAct for Environmental Justice and New York Communities Change, campaigned for the legislation, arguing that a transition off of fossil fuels is necessary for tackling climate change. On top of the climate benefits, they argued, the residents would benefit from cleaner indoor air.

Every city that has attempted to electrify its new buildings has faced an aggressive counter-campaign to maintain the status quo. Gas utilities have worked to thwart these kinds of climate campaigns throughout the country.

These utilities, worried about losing gas-reliant customers, have launched lawsuits and aggressive public relations campaigns in California to stop the march toward clean energy for buildings. One strategy I’ve reported on is the industry effort to hire influencers to tout what they love about cooking with gas to generate public opposition to city efforts. In more conservative parts of the country, gas utilities have worked to pass state laws that prevent cities from even considering modifying building codes to promote electrification. In New York, lobby groups and oil companies, like American Petroleum Institute and ExxonMobil, ran Facebook ads targeting New Yorkers to “voice your support” for gas stoves, E&E News reported.

New York fended off some of the gas industry’s attacks by extending compliance timelines and exempting commercial restaurants that still want to hook up to gas. The gas ban effort there also faced some unusual obstacles compared to nearby cities, like Philadelphia. According to the American Prospect’s reporting, New York City’s major utility companies were split over whether to support the bill, with the hybrid electric and gas utility ConEd supportive, and the more gas-reliant utility, National Grid, firmly opposed.

But the biggest reason climate activists like Sikora suspect NYC’s gas ban survived is the mounting research showing the effect building pollution has on public health, and disproportionately for people of color.

A 2021 study by Harvard environmental health scientist Jonathan Buonocore, an environmental health research scientist at Harvard University, looked at how outdoor building pollution affects health outcomes, and found between 17,000 to 23,500 premature deaths nationwide from the latest data in 2017. RMI, a climate-focused think tank that analyzed his data, found 1,114 premature deaths linked specifically to NYC buildings. Another April study published in Science Advances charted how residential gas and commercial cooking are two major reasons Black, Hispanic, and Asian people are often exposed to higher levels of outdoor pollution than white people.

“With all the progress we’ve made in reducing emissions in electricity sector, buildings are now one of the leading sources of [outdoor] air pollution,” Buonocore said. “They emit a whole variety of pollutants that lead to a lot of different of health impacts, including premature deaths, asthma, heart attack, stroke, and respiratory disease.”

Buonocore’s work looked at how furnaces and boilers release particulate matter and nitrogen oxides outdoors into the atmosphere. His numbers, however, may be an underestimate of its toll, because it didn’t look at the effects of gas stoves and gas ovens on indoor air quality. In most homes, cooking releases the same harmful pollutants directly inside the kitchen.

Cutting out fossil fuels from new buildings solves a lot of these problems at once by “taking out a source of poor air quality that hurts people’s health,” said Sonal Jessel, director of policy at the climate justice group WE ACT for Environmental Justice. In other words, the best way for a city like New York to make a measurable impact on air quality is to get polluting appliances like the stove and boiler out of homes and businesses.

Electrification in NYC could have ripple effects in other parts of the country

New York City’s move is significant for many reasons — with more than 8 million residents, it will be the largest test case in the country for adopting electric-powered technologies. It will have to overcome challenges that didn’t apply to smaller cities in California that have passed electrification so far, like integrating technology for a colder climate and addressing the much higher demand for heat.

New York is signaling its confidence it can overcome these challenges and become an example for other cities to do the same. To smooth over the transition, the bill will require a citywide study on using heat pumps in large buildings.

Cities have a lot more work to do to move from tackling just new construction — both the building and power sector are overdue for more transformative change, and that will require bolder policies that tackle existing gas infrastructure and investments in the near future. For example, activists plan to push the New York state Assembly to adopt legislation that applies statewide that applies to all new construction and to enforce existing laws on the books that promote clean energy.

Until quite recently, it was impossible to conceive that the largest, most gas-reliant American city would consider shutting off the growth in gas stoves and appliances. But now with one milestone behind them, climate activists are already eyeing the next target.

“Not having more gas hookups in new construction is, frankly, the lower-hanging fruit,” said WE ACT’s Jessel. ”The question of how do we reduce emissions and how do we electrify existing buildings becomes a lot more complicated question.”

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Insider: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday rejected the idea of barring members of Congress and their spouses from holding or trading individual stocks while in office. "We are a free-market economy. They should be able to participate in that," Pelosi said when asked by Insider at her weekly press conference. Insider also asked Pelosi about Conflicted Congress, a five-month-long investigation by Insider that found that 49 members of Congress and 182 senior congressional staffers had violated the STOCK Act, a law to prevent Insider trading. The speaker said she hadn't yet seen the project, but added that it's important that members comply with the law. "If people aren't reporting, they should be," she said. Pelosi's position put her at odds with progressives such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, both of whom have called for barring members of Congress from trading stocks while in office. Earlier this year, NPR found that TikTok users have been watching financial disclosures of sitting members of Congress to help them determine which stocks to invest in. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's stock trading disclosures in particular were "a treasure trove," according to some TikTok users. "Shout out to Nancy Pelosi, the stock market's biggest whale," said user 'ceowatchlist.' Another said, "I've come to the conclusion that Nancy Pelosi is a psychic," while adding that she is the "queen of investing." "She knew," declared Chris Josephs, analyzing a particular trade in Pelosi's financial disclosures. "And you would have known if you had followed her portfolio." The report notes that the trades Josephs noticed were actually made by Pelosi's investor husband.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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In the months before the 2020 election, lies about widespread voter fraud steadily spewed from former President Donald Trump’s lips and fingertips like so much sewage from a busted septic line. But among a tranche of text messages obtained by the Jan. 6 committee, a disturbing light shines anew upon the actions of Trump’s most loyal foot soldiers in Congress: One of them was so eager to have the 45th president installed that they suggested tossing out legal votes well before the counting of votes was even complete.

“Here’s an aggressive strategy,” the Nov. 4 text from an unidentified lawmaker to Trump’s then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows began. “Why can’t the states of GA, NC, PENN and other R-controlled state houses declare this is BS [where conflicts and election not called that night] and just send their own electors to vote and have it go to SCOTUS.”

Politico reporter Kyle Cheney pointed out this disturbing dynamic in a tweet on Tuesday night as lawmakers convened in the House to vote on a contempt of Congress referral for Meadows.

Jan. 6 committee Chairman Bennie Thompson has not yet revealed the identity of the person who sent the proposal to Meadows, but he told NBC News this week that there “won’t be any surprises as to who they are.”

As Kyle Cheney opined, once the person is unmasked, it will likely be time to reconcile “his or her claims of concern about voter fraud with the proposal to throw out millions of legal votes before they were even counted.”

This hypocrisy is familiar to Republicans in Trump’s orbit. One-time personal attorney for Trump Rudy Giuliani notoriously went full autocrat during a drunken exchange on election night, according to Washington Post reporters Carol Leonning and Philip Rucker in their book, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year.

When it looked like Trump was losing Michigan, Giuliani urged Trump’s campaign staff and Meadows to just say that Trump had won. Meadows, at the time, reportedly said such a maneuver couldn’t be done.

“We can’t do that, we can’t,” Meadows said on Nov. 4.

But by Nov. 6, his tune had changed.

According to records already obtained by the committee, Thompson said that when a legislator in Congress approached Meadows this time with the “highly controversial” scheme to appoint alternate electors despite a total lack of evidence for election fraud, Meadows responded: “I love it.”

And a day later on Nov. 7, after Biden was formally declared the victor, Meadows would write an email that Thompson said “discusses the appointment of alternate slates of electors as a part of a direct and collateral attack after the election.”

This sequence of events alone paints one of the clearest pictures yet of how the White House condoned lies about the 2020 election and was on board with attempts to subvert the results, consequences be damned.

Further illuminating the committee’s findings was Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, one of Trump’s most loyal lapdogs during his presidency.

Politico was first to report Wednesday that Jordan is defending a portion of another text message unveiled by the committee a day earlier. The part of the message made public stated: “On January 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence, as President of the Senate, should call out all the electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all.”

The full text continued: “In accordance with guidance from founding father Alexander Hamilton and judicial precedence. ‘No legislative act,’ wrote Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 78, ‘contrary to the Constitution, can be valid.’ The court in Hubbard v. Lowe reinforced this truth: ‘That an unconstitutional statute is not a law at all is a proposition no longer open to discussion.’ 226 F. 135, 137 (SDNY 1915), appeal dismissed, 242 U.S. 654 (1916).”

Russell Dye, a spokesperson for Jordan, told Politico that the message from Jordan was merely a forward to Meadows of legal analysis compiled by Joseph Schmitz, the Pentagon’s inspector general.

“Schmitt’s words are an argument that Pence had the unilateral authority to simply refuse to count electoral votes he deemed unconstitutional, akin to arguments made by Trump allies John Eastman and Jenna Ellis,” Politico reported.

Though Jordan maintains the message was a forward, the text itself does not necessarily indicate that.

Meanwhile, as Meadows awaits his fate on contempt charges that have now been referred to the Department of Justice and the mystery lawmaker’s messages are in the public square courtesy of the Jan. 6 committee, two key organizers for Trump’s “Stop the Steal” propaganda, Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lynn Lawrence, have also stepped into the light.

Both Stockton and Lawrence were subpoenaed by the committee in late November. A month prior to that, the duo served as anonymous sources for another Rolling Stone article where they claimed that members of Congress were directly involved in Trump’s scheme to overturn the election and helped orchestrate the rally at the Ellipse on Jan. 6.

Stockton and Lawrence told Rolling Stone that Arizona Republican Rep. Paul Gosar offered a tit-for-tat deal, telling the couple they could receive a “blanket pardon” from Trump in another unrelated investigation if they would protest the election results. Gosar has denied the exchange.

The couple also said they had warned Meadows that their discussions with organizers of the pro-Trump rallies in the runup to Jan. 6 left them worried about looming threats of violence.

“The people and the history books deserve a real account of what happened,” Stockton told Rolling Stone.

Lawrence added: “Violent shit happened. We want to get to the bottom of that.”

Importantly, the couple also admits they are running low on funds and don’t have the ability to fend off a hungry congressional probe that has shown it will go the distance to hold those who refuse to cooperate in contempt. They had a self-proclaimed “falling out” with ex-Trump strategist Steve Bannon following Bannon’s We Build the Wall fraud scheme, which led to his arrest and later, to his pardon by Trump. Stockton and Lawrence were raided in connection to that scheme but were never charged.

“We definitely didn’t want to face another violent raid and we also wanted to avoid racking up even more legal fees and trouble,” the couple told Rolling Stone.

The duo admitted to working with other commission probe targets, like Amy Kremer of Women for America First, to coordinate rallies promoting Trump’s lies about election fraud in mid-November, but in the recent interview, Stockton said Trump’s incitements on Jan. 6 incensed him.

“We assumed that him sitting with all the access to all the agencies of government and classified information he … had access to vastly more information than we did,” Stockton told Rolling Stone. “We trusted when he told us that it was black-and-white and that there was clear evidence over, and over, and over again. We trusted that it would be there, and it ended up being a bluff, and he finally got caught in it.”

Now the couple says they are “going nuclear” and are cooperating with the committee in full to expose everyone who was involved.

Unsurprisingly, other individuals also under subpoena by the committee are less keen on transparency.

John Eastman, the author of the now-infamous memo outlining a six-point strategy to overturn the 2020 election, has opted to sue the committee. Eastman argues that lawmakers went too far by demanding he turn over data from a three-month span, and he contends the committee does not have a legislative function. Meadows also sued the committee and Verizon last week as well as Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Meadows is asking a federal court to bar enforcement of the subpoena lobbed against him and the requests sent by the committee to Verizon.

The committee has targeted call records for over 100 people but significantly, they are not after the content of calls. They seek only time logs that would reveal details like when calls are made and their duration.

Kyrsten Sinema supports the elections reform bill that Democrats are considering a year-end push to pass. She doesn't support a shortcut around the filibuster to get it done.

The Arizona moderate is making clear that she intends to keep protecting the Senate’s 60-vote requirement on most legislation and she isn’t ready to entertain changing rules to pass sweeping elections or voting legislation with a simple majority. Her Democratic colleagues have been discussing those revisions as they weigh dropping their focus on President Joe Biden’s $1.7 trillion climate and social spending bill and pivoting to voting rights, though it’s not clear that avenue will be any more successful.

In a statement to POLITICO, a spokesperson said that Sinema “continues to support the Senate's 60-vote threshold, to protect the country from repeated radical reversals in federal policy which would cement uncertainty, deepen divisions, and further erode Americans’ confidence in our government.” Since joining the Senate in 2019, Sinema’s been a fierce defender of the filibuster and warned that reversing it could lead to terrible outcomes for Democrats down the line.

Sinema continues to support the Freedom to Vote Act, which was negotiated with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), as well as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, even as she raises questions about how to pass those bills in an evenly divided Senate. Democratic senators have mostly focused on lobbying Manchin to try and sway him to pass elections legislation with a simple majority, but Sinema isn’t there yet either.

“Senator Sinema has asked those who want to weaken or eliminate the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation which she supports if it would be good for our country to do so,” said her spokesperson John LaBombard. He warned that legislation could be “rescinded in a few years and replaced by a nationwide voter-ID law, nationwide restrictions on vote-by-mail, or other voting restrictions currently passing in some states extended nationwide.”

Manchin and Sinema both attended a Wednesday afternoon meeting with Sens. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Angus King (I-Maine), centrists who are advocating for a workaround to the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation. Democrats also discussed how to pass elections reform bills during a party lunch on Tuesday, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer met with Manchin, King, Kaine and Tester on Wednesday morning.

Importantly, Democrats are no longer trying to scrap the filibuster altogether given Manchin's and Sinema's opposition to that step. Instead, they're pivoting to an attempt to sway the duo to support a rules change that could enable legislation curbing gerrymandering and restoring the Voting Rights Act to evade the 60-vote requirement.

The leading options that Manchin and Sinema's colleagues hope to sway them on are installing the talking filibuster, which would force the minority to hold the floor and continuously put up at least 41 votes to block legislation, or creating a filibuster exception specific to the issue of elections and voting.

Regardless, Democrats would need to use the so-called "nuclear option" to change the Senate's rules on a simple majority vote, something Manchin and Sinema have typically opposed. After Wednesday afternoon's meeting, Manchin said the issue is "a tough one ... because what goes around comes around here. You’ve got to be very careful what you do."

On Tuesday, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.). lamented the Senate’s filibuster exemption to raise the debt ceiling, saying he agonized over whether to support that proposal as voting legislation stalls. Warnock is a leading advocate for confronting voting rights this month, rather than punting on reforms until January or later.

“Our democracy is clearly imperiled. The lights are flashing and we are irresponsible if we don’t respond," Warnock said.

And Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) came out in support of changing the filibuster to pass elections legislation, reasoning that "if we can change the process on the debt ceiling, then surely we can do the same to protect our democracy.”

Sinema's spokesperson said she "believes that the right to vote and faith in our electoral process are critical to the health of our democracy." And though she’s open to discussions about the Senate rules, she still wants to hear a more comprehensive debate on the Senate floor.

“It is time for the Senate to publicly debate its rules, including the filibuster, so senators and all Americans can hear and fully consider such ideas, concerns, and consequences,” LaBombard said. “If there are proposals to make the Senate work better for everyday Americans without risking repeated radical reversals in federal policy, Senator Sinema is eager to hear such ideas and — as always — is willing to engage in good-faith discussions with her colleagues."

Marianne LeVine contributed to this report.

The Navy has begun kicking out sailors who refuse to get the Covid-19 vaccine, but it won’t slap dishonorable discharges on anyone for their decision to ignore a direct order.

Overall, 5,731 active-duty sailors remain unvaccinated, and at this point Navy officials say they believe most of those will likely continue to refuse the order, weeks after the Nov. 28 deadline for full vaccination.

“If a sailor gets their shot, we will honor that and make every effort to retain them,” Rear Adm. James Waters, the Navy’s director of military personnel plans and policy, told reporters. “On the other hand, those who continue to refuse the vaccine will be required to leave the Navy.”

A total of 336,000 sailors are vaccinated, a massive undertaking that service leaders stressed was necessary to keep ships crewed during deployments, where sailors work in close contact in cramped spaces for months at a time.

The announcement comes the same week the Air Force discharged more than two-dozen airmen for refusing the shot.

Under the Navy’s rules, unvaccinated officers and enlisted sailors eligible to retire or leave the service before June 1, 2022, will be allowed to do so with an honorable discharge.

Those not eligible to leave by that date “will be processed for separation on the basis of misconduct for refusing the lawful order to be vaccinated,” Waters said, but will still receive an honorable discharge.

That changes for those with more than six years of service, who “will be processed with the least favorable characterization of service, being general, under honorable conditions, barring other misconduct,” he added.

Overall, about 90 percent of the active-duty military are vaccinated, a number that drops to just 75 percent when the National Guard and Reserves are factored in, signaling a tough road ahead for DoD as it moves to get the entire force vaccinated.

The services are all facing the removal of thousands of troops from its rosters for refusing the vaccine, a process that will likely take months and impact each service in different ways. The Marine Corps says about 95 percent of its 186,000-strong force has had at least one shot, which means roughly 10,000 continue to refuse.

Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger was blunt in speaking with reporters during a roundtable at the Reagan National Defense Forum this month, saying “we're not bluffing” in enforcing the order and removing Marines who refuse their shots.

The vaccine mandate is “a direct order,” Berger said. “It’s not one any of the services made up. If you could rewind the clock and remove all the political football of it a year ago, I’d love to find a way to do that. But we can’t.”

Berger thinks that “most Marines will still get vaccinated. They’re past the deadline, but I think eventually, once they see [someone] get separated, the rest will go, ‘Okay. They’re serious.’”

One DoD official, speaking anonymously to comment on a sensitive issue, said the situation is the same for the Army. “I think it’s fair to say we are probably going to see some people leave the Army as a result of the vaccine mandate, because there are some people who just feel very strongly that they don’t want to take it.”

The Army is expected to release their way forward for separating vaccine refusers later Wednesday, a DoD official told POLITICO.

Asked when the Marine Corps would release its separation policy, spokesperson Capt. Ryan Bruce said Tuesday that because “each case will be handled on a case by case basis, there is no uniform, service-wide timeline associated with completing the administrative separation process.”

“All unvaccinated Marines without a pending or approved administrative exemption, medical exemption, or religious accommodation, or appeal, will be processed for administrative separation,” he said.

The deadline for Air Force members to be vaccinated was Nov. 2, while Navy and Marine Corps members were ordered to get the vaccine by Nov. 28. The cutoff date for Army members is Wednesday, and Army National Guard and Reserve members have until June 30 to receive their shots.

The Air Force was the first service to start the process of removing service members, separating 27 active-duty airmen this week.

Those 27 were part of the roughly 3,200 airmen across active duty, National Guard and Reserve to have refused the vaccine, while another 10,500 have sought religious exemptions. No religious exemptions have been granted in any service to date.

The Navy is still considering about 2,700 religious exemptions, and Waters said any sailor who has their exemption request denied has five days to get their first shot, or the separation process would begin.

Like the Navy, the airmen being processed for removal will receive either honorable discharges or general discharges under honorable conditions.

Dismissals become a political punching bag

Still, Republican lawmakers have expressed fresh outrage over the Defense Department’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate following the Air Force dismissals.

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) said President Joe Biden has “little regard for the impact his mandate would have on our military’s readiness.”

“The last thing our military needs right now is to be losing servicemen because of an overbearing and unnecessary vaccine mandate that never should have been issued in the first place,” he said in a statement Tuesday.

Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) — the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee — reiterated his call for the Pentagon to “suspend the vaccine mandate until the Department of Defense can answer basic questions about the impact the mandate will have on the total force.”

In a statement Tuesday, Inhofe also invoked a federal judge’s ruling last week that blocked the Biden administration from enforcing a Covid-19 vaccine mandate for employees of federal contractors.

Following that decision, the Pentagon last week put a temporary halt on enforcement of Biden’s executive order, which requires vaccination as a condition for working with the government.

“We’re already seeing how the government is backing off enforcement of the mandate for everyone from defense contractors to Amtrak employees — the Department of Defense should likewise hold off on these permanent separations until they at least answer my questions,” Inhofe said.

“In the meantime,” he continued, “I am glad the [National Defense Authorization Act] prevents service members from being dishonorably discharged because of this mandate, and I’m eager to see this bill signed into law as soon as the Senate votes to send it to the president.”

Inhofe was referring to a proposed amendment to the Senate’s version of the defense policy bill, which would prohibit the Pentagon from giving service members who refuse the Covid-19 vaccine a dishonorable discharge.

Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), a former Army doctor who authored the measure, said in a statement Tuesday that service members who decide not to get vaccinated “do not deserve a dishonorable discharge for choosing against the vaccine.”

A dishonorable discharge, he argued, “treats our heroes as felons and our American heroes deserve better. I look forward to the NDAA being brought to a vote in the Senate which includes my amendment to provide these [service members] with retroactive protection if they were dishonorably discharged.”

“It’s shameful that President Biden wants to punish members of our military simply because they are uncomfortable taking a vaccine,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) added in a statement.

Despite the attacks from Republican lawmakers, Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby suggested Wednesday that no service members would be dishonorably discharged for refusing the Covid-19 vaccine.

Asked about vaccine-related separations across the military, he stressed that “each service is going to handle this their own way.”

“One result could be administrative discharge, like the Air Force is doing,” Kirby told MSNBC. “Now, there’s been a lot of talk about dishonorable discharge. You don’t get that unless you go to court-martial. So we’re talking about administrative discharges that don’t result in some sort of dishonorable discharge or some punitive problem.”

Kirby also noted that this year alone, the service “has administratively separated 1,800 airmen for reasons not related to Covid. So this is not a big number, and it’s not a significant chunk of the Air Force personnel.”

None of Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) objections add up. What's his real aim here?

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The Senate found a way to bypass the filibuster to raise the debt ceiling, and Sen. Raphael Warnock is pushing to use that as a model for voting rights legislation—and he clearly got the attention of many of his fellow Senate Democrats.

The Senate’s debt ceiling deal involved passing one bill to allow the Senate to pass another bill that had the debt ceiling increase. The trick is, the first bill had to get 60 votes, overcoming a filibuster, in order for the second bill to pass with 50 votes. Ten Republican senators had to sign on for the first bill, and 14 of them did. But 10 Republican senators would not have just plain voted to raise the debt ceiling. No, it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but that’s the toxic combination of today’s Republican Party and Democratic deference to Senate traditions. And Warnock used the maneuvering to change the subject powerfully to voting rights.

“We think it’s so important that we change the rule in order to save the economy,” Warnock told NBC News on Tuesday. “Well, the warning lights on our democracy are blinking right now, and we seem unwilling to respond with the same urgency to protect the democracy that we have to protect the economy.”

The thing is, as Warnock knows, many Republicans did want to prevent the U.S. government from defaulting on its obligations and completely tanking the economy. They weren’t willing to openly vote on the measure that would prevent that from happening, but the end goal was important enough to enough of them to engage in some legislative shenanigans to make it happen. By contrast, there are not 10 Republican senators who want to save U.S. democracy by strengthening voting rights.

Again, Warnock knows this. But by talking about it publicly—including giving a powerful speech on the Senate floor (watch it below) laying out his hesitation about voting to raise the debt ceiling despite inaction on voting rights—he’s sending a message about just how important this is to find the way to overcome that.

In his speech lashing the decision to bend the rules for the debt ceiling but not for voting rights, Warnock emphasized the history of Republicans admitting that they don’t want everyone to vote—placing the pressure squarely on Democrats to get voting rights done. In a blistering passage, he dismantled the rhetoric of bipartisanship when it comes to basic human and civil rights.

“Second thing I said to my Democratic colleagues today is that while we cannot let our Republican friends off the hook for not being equitable governing partners, if we are serious about protecting the right to vote that’s under assault right now, here’s the truth: It will fall to Democrats to do it. If Democrats alone must raise the debt ceiling, then Democrats alone must raise and repair the ceiling of our democracy. How do we in good conscience justify doing one and not the other? Some of my Democratic colleagues are saying, ‘But what about bipartisanship? Isn’t that important?’ I say of course it is. But here’s the thing we must remember. Slavery was bipartisan. Jim Crow segregation was bipartisan. The refusal of women’s suffrage was bipartisan. The denial of the basic dignity of members of the LGBTQ community has long been bipartisan. The Three-fifths Compromise was the creation of a punitive national unity at the expense of Black people’s basic humanity.

“So when colleagues in this chamber talk to me about bipartisanship—which I believe in—I just have to ask, ‘At whose expense?’ Who is being asked to foot the bill for this bipartisanship, and is liberty itself the cost? I submit that that’s a price too high and a bridge too far.”

Following Warnock’s Senate speech, Sen. Mark Warner announced his support for changing filibuster rules to pass voting rights legislation. Sen. Michael Bennet, too, moved toward support for filibuster reform. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer addressed voting rights on the Senate floor on Wednesday morning, amid reports that he would put off a Build Back Better vote into 2022 and push to pass voting rights legislation before the end of 2021. The question is still where Democrats would find the Republican votes to even allow a simple majority vote on voting rights—or if they can get every single Democrat, Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema included, on board to reform the filibuster.