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Post by Webster on Feb 27, 2023 18:06:53 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Elissa Slotkin, a Democratic House lawmaker from Michigan who won re-election last year in one of the most hotly contested races of the cycle, announced she will stand for the state’s open Senate seat in 2024. “I’m running for Senate because I believe that we need a new generation of leaders that thinks differently, works harder, and never forgets that we are public servants,” Slotkin wrote in an email to supporters. She would replace Debbie Stabenow, Michigan’s Democratic senator who has opted not to seek another term. A former CIA analyst who worked in the defense department under Barack Obama, Slotkin banked heavily on her support of abortion rights in her successful run for election last November.
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Post by Webster on Feb 27, 2023 18:07:39 GMT -5
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Post by Webster on Mar 1, 2023 13:29:45 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Arizona has become a focal point of rightwing efforts to disrupt elections, and the Guardian’s Rachel Leingang spoke with its new attorney general about how she plans to keep poll workers safe: In less than two months on the job, Arizona’s Democratic attorney general, Kris Mayes, reassigned a unit tasked with investigating election fraud to instead focus on protecting voting rights. She then publicly took former attorney general Mark Brnovich, a Republican, to task for hiding documents that showed the 2020 election was free from widespread fraud. “Obviously, there are clear differences between me and my predecessor on these issues,” Mayes said.
In Arizona, where a Democratic governor and Republican-controlled legislature are unlikely to agree on any major alterations to election law, the biggest changes for democracy could instead come from the attorney general’s office. As the state’s top prosecutor, Mayes has the power to investigate voting crimes and bring charges against those who break election laws.
Before winning the attorney general’s office, Mayes was a reporter and an attorney and a member of former Democratic governor Janet Napolitano’s administration. A Republican until 2019, Mayes said she switched parties because the GOP’s embrace of Trumpism left her and other moderate Republicans behind.
Her perspective on elections differs greatly from her predecessor. In his last two years in office, Brnovich tried to play both sides of election issues, seeking to appease the far-right flank of his party in pursuit of a US Senate seat while not filing charges for widespread fraud. At first, he defended Joe Biden’s victory in the state, but over time, cast doubt on Maricopa county’s elections.
Mayes also contrasted strongly with her Republican challenger in the 2022 race, Abe Hamadeh, who she narrowly beat. Hamadeh embraced the falsehood that Trump won the 2020 election and was one of several election deniers who lost their statewide races in the increasingly purple state.
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Post by Webster on Mar 1, 2023 17:11:47 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Joe Manchin, the Democratic senator whose hostility to aggressively fighting climate change and some social aid programs infuriated progressives, remains coy about whether he will stand for another term in 2024, Punchbowl News reports. Try and decode this: Love him or hate him, the truth is that Manchin’s presence has allowed Democrats to control the Senate since January 2021 – and few in the party believe that voters in red-state West Virginia would replace him with another Democrat if he does not run again.
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Post by Webster on Mar 4, 2023 16:38:06 GMT -5
(The Guardian) The Texas Republican party has voted to censure House representative Tony Gonzales over his recent party-splitting votes in Congress. On Saturday, the State Republican Executive Committee voted 57-5 on the censure resolution. The censure resolution “cited his support for the bipartisan gun law that passed last year, as well as his vote for a bill codifying protections for same-sex marriage. The resolution also pointed to his vote against the House rules package in January and his opposition to a border security bill being pushed by fellow Texas GOP Rep. Chip Roy of Austin,” the Texas Tribune reports. In a news conference on Thursday, Gonzales, a moderate Republican, defended his vote for the bipartisan gun law, saying, “I would vote twice on it if I could.” “The reality is I’ve taken almost 1,400 votes, and the bulk of those have been with the Republican Party,” he added.
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Post by Webster on Mar 8, 2023 14:35:10 GMT -5
(The Guardian) GOP use hearing to condemn Biden's "disastrous" pull out from AfghanistanHouse Republicans convened their first hearing on what the committee chairman called the Biden’s administration’s “disastrous” withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. Opening the House foreign affairs committee hearing earlier, the Texas congressman Michael McCaul called for a moment of silence for 13 US service members killed in a terrorist attack near the Kabul airport during the evacuation. More than 100 Afghan civilians were also killed in the attack. “What happened in Afghanistan was a systemic breakdown of the federal government at every level,” McCaul said, vowing to hold to account officials responsible for what he said was the “abdication of the most basic duties of the United States government to protect Americans and leave no one behind”. For nearly two weeks in August 2021, the world watched as harrowing scenes played out live on television, including desperate Afghans clinging to the underside of a US transport plane, after the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban. In the chaos, McCaul said, the US left more than “1,000 American citizens” in Afghanistan as well as “almost 200,000” Afghan allies. To those “left behind,” the Republican chair said he was committed to getting them “the hell out of there”. The ranking Democrat, Gregory Meeks of New York, said Joe Biden made the “right decision” to end a 20-year war which extracted a “great cost” on the nation. Meeks acknowledged that “mistakes” were made during the evacuation but noted it was Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, who struck a deal with the Taliban for US forces to leave Afghanistan by May 2021. To that end, Meeks urged the committee to use this opportunity to understand what went wrong, rather than to “score political points”.
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Post by Webster on Mar 8, 2023 14:38:06 GMT -5
(The Guardian) In emotional testimony to the House foreign affairs committee this morning, two US service members recounted harrowing scenes at the Kabul airport, where they were stationed when a suicide bomber attacked on 26 August 2021. “It was complete chaos,” said Aidan Gunderson, a former army specialist who left active duty in July. Tyler Vargas-Andrews, a US Marines sergeant who lost an organ and two limbs in the attack, offered some of the most startling testimony of the morning, recalling mothers desperately handing over children while some Afghans chose to take their own lives rather than face the brutality of the Taliban. Speaking under oath, Vargas-Andrews told the panel he identified the suicide bomber among the crush trying to enter the airport but was not given approval to shoot the suspect dead. The attack killed 13 US service members and injured at least 20. “My body was catastrophically wounded with 100 to 150 ball bearings,” Vargas-Andrews said, pausing to fight tears. “Almost immediately we started taking fire from the neighborhood and I saw how injured I was with my right arm completely shredded and unusable. I saw my lower abdomen soaked in blood.” “The withdrawal was a catastrophe in my opinion and there was an inexcusable lack of accountability and negligence,” said Vargas-Andrews, who has undergone 44 surgeries. Vargas-Andrews stated that he was appearing in his personal capacity. His account, detailed in the Washington Post, disputes aspects of the Pentagon’s account of the incident. “This is not the story of a Biden failure or a Trump failure. This is the story of an American failure and the effect it has had and continues to have on Afghans who served alongside myself and so many others,” Peter Lucier, a veteran of the Afghanistan war who helped evacuate allied Afghans with Team America Relief, told the panel. “The failures that led to this point are owned and shared by four administrations, by Congress and by 320,000,000 Americans. This was our war.”
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Post by Webster on Mar 10, 2023 16:23:36 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Will veteran Vermont senator Bernie Sanders run for reelection? That’s the question being posed by an interesting article in New York magazine’s Intelligencer. On one hand, Sanders, who has run for the Democratic presidential nomination in each of the last two elections, would seem to be at the peak of his powers. A respected authoritative figure whose voice carries great weight in progressive circles, he is the new chair of the Senate health committee, an issue he is extremely passionate about. On the other, Sanders, who has been a senator since 2007, and a congressman before that since 1991, is 81 now, and would be 89 at the end of a subsequent term. He has not discussed his plans, either publicly or with his staff, Intelligencer says, but is acutely aware of his advancing years and overall health: he had a heart attack in 2019. The article notes Vermont’s filing deadline is not until August 2024, so Sanders has no urgency to make up his mind. Some are also speculating he won’t make any announcement or decision until Joe Biden decides whether he’s running again for the White House.
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Post by Webster on Mar 14, 2023 13:52:02 GMT -5
(The Guardian) George Santos moves closer to filing for re-electionGeorge Santos, the Republican congressman who has admitted to telling many lies in his successful run for office last year, filed paperwork that would allow him to stand for a second term representing his district, the New York Times reports. The lawmaker’s filing of a statement of candidacy with the Federal Election Commission does not mean Santos will necessarily run again, according to the Times, but does let him raise money for campaign expenses. Ever since Santos’s fabrications were revealed by the newspaper shortly after his election victory in a Democratic-leaning New York district, the congressman has faced calls to resign from his own constituents and lawmakers from both parties. He’s resisted those calls, but is also at the center of several investigations, including a House ethics committee inquiry and a sexual harassment allegation.
George Santos has also taken a page out of Nikki Haley’s book and is proposing legislation that would force the president to take a mental competency test. Haley, Donald Trump’s former UN ambassador who is running for the GOP’s presidential nomination next year, has proposed making anyone over 75 pass a mental competency test in order to serve in the White House. Trump and Joe Biden are both over that age. Santos is more direct: his legislation would force the current president to take a test, by the start of next year. “Regardless of political affiliation, this should be a common sense and bipartisan agreement that when a man or a woman becomes President, they submit to an annual cognitive evaluation,” Santos, an admitted fabulist, said in a statement. “Physical examination results are publicly released throughout their time in office, and a thorough cognitive assessment should also be included, and failure to comply will result in no federal funds being obligated or expended for official travel.”
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Post by Webster on Mar 27, 2023 12:55:50 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Elizabeth Warren announced Monday that she’s running for a third term in the Senate. The Massachusetts Democrat, a progressive who ran for the party’s 2020 presidential nomination, says she’s seeking reelection to “end corruption in Washington, make the economy work for the middle class and protect democracy,” according to the Associated Press. “I first ran for Senate because I saw how the system is rigged for the rich and powerful and against everyone else. I won because Massachusetts voters know it, too. And now I’m running for Senate again because there’s a lot more we’ve got to do,” Warren, 73, said in a campaign video released Monday.
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Post by Webster on Mar 29, 2023 14:21:50 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Democrat: Hawley 'a fraud and a coward' over NashvilleA Democratic opponent of Josh Hawley labelled the far-right Missouri senator “a fraud and a coward”, after the Republican demanded the killing of three nine-year-old children and three adults at a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, be investigated as a federal hate crime. Less than two years ago, Hawley was the only senator to vote against a bill to crack down on hate crimes against Asian Americans during the Covid pandemic. That bill, he said, would “turn the federal government into the speech police [and] give government sweeping authority to decide what counts as offensive speech and then monitor it”. Federal and state authorities have said the motive in the Nashville attack had not been established. On Tuesday, Lucas Kunce, a Missouri Democrat running to oppose Hawley in 2024, said: “One out of 100 senators voted against the anti-hate crime bill in 2021. His name is Josh Hawley. He’s a fraud and a coward. Some days it’s more obvious than others.”
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Post by Webster on Apr 7, 2023 15:24:44 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Kyrsten Sinema, the enigmatic Arizona senator who stunned colleagues by announcing she was flipping to become an independent after Democrats retained control of the chamber in December, plans to defend her seat, according to the Wall Street Journal. The newspaper reported Friday that Sinema is “preparing for a re-election campaign, setting the stage for what could be an unpredictable three-way contest” next year in the key swing state. The article said Sinema met with staff at a retreat in Phoenix earlier this week to begin laying the groundwork of her campaign. Along with West Virginia Democrat and centrist senator Joe Manchin, Sinema was a holdout on several key elements of Joe Biden’s legislative agenda during the first two years of his administration, though she still caucuses with, and usually votes in tandem with Democrats.
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Post by Webster on Apr 11, 2023 17:21:37 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Democratic House representative Jennifer Wexton has announced she has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease:
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Post by Webster on Apr 12, 2023 13:52:55 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Democratic Wisconsin senator Tammy Baldwin says she’s running for a third term, news greeted enthusiastically by the chair of the state party. Ben Wikler says Republicans are “hiding under a rug” because none so far have announced they are challenging for Baldwin’s seat in the key swing state, according to the Associated Press. Baldwin, in a statement, said she intends to continue fighting for the working class and families struggling with inflation, as well as opposing Wisconsin’s ban on elective abortions. She became the state’s first female member of congress in 1998, and was elected to the Senate in 2012, handing Republican former governor Tommy Thompson his first defeat in a statewide race.
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Post by Webster on Apr 12, 2023 21:11:23 GMT -5
(Breitbart) Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-MI), who many believed would run for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), bowed out of the potential run on Tuesday. Dingell said in a lengthy statement on Twitter that she had been encouraged to run for the open U.S. Senate seat over the last several months but would prefer to stay and work for the people in her congressional district. “After much consideration, I have decided that I can best serve Michigan and our nation as a member of the U.S. House. Because, bluntly, I love my job. I love my district. And most importantly, I love my constituents,” Dingell said in her statement on Tuesday. “I look forward to continuing my work to represent the people of Michigan’s 6th district,” she added while noting that she wants to keep “deliver[ing] solutions” for seniors and working families, in addition to working on bringing the supply chains home and boosting manufacturing. Dingell is one of Michigan’s more high-profile politicians and represents Michigan’s Sixth Congressional District. After Stabenow announced she would not seek reelection to make way for a crop of new political leaders, speculation on who would run for the seat on the Democrat side quickly ramped up. Dingell not running leaves Rep. Elissa Slotkin, who announced she would run for the seat in February, able to coast to the nomination unless another high-profile person was to enter the race. Slotkin’s announcement was not a surprise to many, despite it coming barely three months after she was in a tough reelection spot. Following the last controversial campaign season, Slotkin and her husband got a divorce after 12 years of marriage. The two announced via a joint statement to the Detroit Free Press, claiming that “after careful consideration,” they “reached this decision together after much reflection, and we do it on agreeable terms.” It followed very public controversy during the last campaign cycle when she was living in a residence owned by a “lobbyist,” who is a “part-time” corporate “executive” for a pharmaceutical manufacturer receiving millions in federal funding — and has donated to her campaign — to run for the new congressional seat. At the time, the “lobbyist” and his family were registered to vote at the same residence where Slotkin resided. When Slotkin was confronted about the situation during a television debate with her Republican opponent, state Sen. Tom Barrett, she responded to the news anchor asking the questions, calling the attacks “political desperation,” since she claimed to be paying fair market value. Slotkin’s Republican opponent attacked her by saying there were over 1,500 available apartments in Lansing, Michigan, at the time, yet Slotkin was living in the one owned by the executive who donated to her campaign. Following the controversy, Slotkin triumphed over Barrett to win reelection in Michigan’s Seventh Congressional District in one of the most intense and expensive races anywhere in the country, as Breitbart News reported. As Breitbart News noted in January, Michigan not having an incumbent Democrat senator could help the Republicans’ chances across the state, while a GOP candidate for Senate and president would be at the top of the ticket. In the last presidential election, President Joe Biden only won in the state with roughly 50.5 percent. In the next election cycle, 23 of the 33 Senate seats up for reelection are currently held by Democrats or left-leaning Independents. Former President Donald Trump won six of those states by double digits in at least one of his presidential elections.
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