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Colorado Dems Brace for Their Own Insurgent Earthquake

2 hours agoCenter Right

The insurgent left just shook New York. Colorado Democrats increasingly think they could be next.

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MAGA lawmaker's sex misconduct complaint against Dem thrown out

Raw Story

2 hours ago

MAGA lawmaker's sex misconduct complaint against Dem thrown out

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL)'s ethics complaint against a Democratic senator collapsed Monday after the Senate Ethics Committee found no evidence to support it.Luna filed the complaint in April against Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), accusing him of sexual misconduct and campaign finance violations. The committee, led by Chair Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) and Vice Chair Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), investigated and cleared him."We are writing to inform you that the Select Committee on Ethics…dismissed a complaint filed against you by Representative Anna Paulina Luna," the letter read."Based on the investigation of the Committee, the Committee did not find evidence that your actions violated Federal law, Senate Rules, or related standards of conduct."Luna's complaint grew out of the scandal surrounding then-Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), Gallego's close friend, who resigned from Congress in April after four women accused him of sexual assault, harassment, and rape — all of which Swalwell has denied.Luna wrote on X on April 23: "I have now heard of 4 women who have had multiple and uncomfortable/inappropriate advances/comments/touching, etc. from Senator Gallego. This is not made up and the Senate is being awfully quiet about it."The committee told NBC News it also reviewed Federal Election Commission reports, Senate and House expenditure reports, and privately sponsored travel records."In response to your request for an investigation, the Committee referred these allegations to you and requested additional information on April 17 and May 15, 2026," the letter stated."The Committee also noted your prompt contact with the Committee following media reports of the allegations and appreciated your full cooperation with the Committee throughout the investigation."Gallego reacted to the dismissal on Monday."Today's dismissal reaffirms what I have said about these accusations from the beginning: they were right-wing conspiracies peddled by far-right activists like Anna Paulina Luna, the White House, and their allies," the senator said in a statement."I look forward to an apology from Rep. Luna for weaponizing the ethics process while refusing to investigate historic corruption that's making life harder for families," he added.Gallego, who set up a legal defense fund to cover legal fees, has denied knowledge of Swalwell's alleged conduct, saying he was "lied to.""As always, the Committee retains the authority to revisit this matter should additional facts become known," the committee added.

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RNC Sues Colorado’s TDS-Afflicted Elections Chief For Violating State Constitution

The Federalist

3 hours ago

RNC Sues Colorado’s TDS-Afflicted Elections Chief For Violating State Constitution

Secretary of State Jena Griswold's UOCAVA guidance permitting 'never residents' of Colorado is in conflict with residency law.

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'Communists!' Karoline Leavitt returns from baby hiatus with unhinged anti-Dem rant

Raw Story

6 hours ago

'Communists!' Karoline Leavitt returns from baby hiatus with unhinged anti-Dem rant

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt marked her return from maternity leave Monday by immediately attacking Democratic candidates as "communists" on Fox & Friends.Leavitt gave birth to her daughter, Viviana "Vivi" Riccio, eight weeks ago and stepped away from the briefing room podium in late April. Her first TV appearance back was on Fox & Friends Monday morning."How does it feel to return for America 250?" co-host Lawrence Jones asked."Well, becoming a mother changes your perspective on everything," Leavitt said. "And you realize how blessed we are to live in this country, to bring up babies in a nation where they can be whatever they want to be," she continued. "And I look forward to raising them in this wonderful country.""So I'm back to work, and motherhood is in full swing," she added.In a pivot to Iran, co-host Brian Kilmeade noted that American forces had recently exchanged fire with Iranian-backed attackers. The targets included U.S. bases in Bahrain and Kuwait, as well as merchant ships in the region."So as far as we're concerned, we're holding up our end of the ceasefire," Leavitt insisted. "Violence will be met with violence."Then co-host Ainsley Earhardt raised the rise of democratic socialists — including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D-NY) and D.C. mayoral Democratic primary winner Janeese Lewis George (D-DC) — and asked why President Donald Trump would agree to meet with them."Well, the president is always willing to sit down and meet with anyone," Leavitt replied. "However, I know the president and many Americans are extremely concerned about how far left the Democrat [sic] party is moving.""You see these candidates — this is not your granddaddy's Democrat [sic] party," she charged. "These are communists! The president is right to call them that.""They want to abolish private prisons. They want to abolish the police. They want to abolish private property," Leavitt continued. "These are radical Marxist ideas that have never worked in the history of the world.""And I think it's a choice coming up between communism and common sense," the press secretary continued. "And you see Democrat elected officials right here on Capitol Hill — Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer — are afraid to stand up and speak out against these radical communists who are taking over their party," Leavitt said. "It's quite scary."Trump's approval rating sits 16 points underwater, according to the RealClearPolitics polling aggregate, with public perceptions of his economic stewardship sinking even lower, the Washington Examiner reported.

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Trump's 'earthquake' Supreme Court win shocks legal experts: 'There's no sugar-coating it'

Raw Story

6 hours ago

Trump's 'earthquake' Supreme Court win shocks legal experts: 'There's no sugar-coating it'

A U.S. Supreme Court ruling issued Monday will end 90 years of court precedent that limits the president's power over independent agencies.The conservative majority voted 6-3 to overturn a landmark 1935 ruling in the Humphrey’s Executor case that had found the president unlawfully fired a member of the Federal Trade Commission, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent that her colleagues had essentially concluded "all three branches of Government have been acting in open defiance of the Constitution all this time."The Trump v. Slaughter case focused on the president's March 2025 firing of Rebecca Slaughter, the last remaining Democrat on the FTC, explaining by email that keeping her as a commissioner would be “inconsistent with [the] administration’s priorities."The court ruled 5-4 in a separate case that Trump lacked the authority to fire Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, and legal experts puzzled over the pair of diverging outcomes – each penned by Chief Justice John Roberts."There's no sugar-coating Slaughter," sighed Georgetown law professor Steve Vladek. "It's an enormously important ruling (far more important than the other three decisions #SCOTUS handed down today). It's a huge win for Trump/the executive. And it's going to have massive ramifications for the functioning of the government long after Trump is gone.""Welcome to the 'Majority overrules Humphrey’s Executor' phase of our descent into fascism," declared civil rights lawyer Joshua Erlich. "If something has been done a certain way for a hundred years and now it's suddenly unconstitutional, that really should require an amendment to the constitution. Otherwise what are we doing here.""There's no real difference between the FTC and the FED other than Roberts likes the Fed," opined The Nation's Elie Mystal."Slaughter is an earthquake," warned Slate's Mark Joseph Stern. "SCOTUS has overturned a 90-year-old precedent that facilitated much of modern governance by granting many agencies meaningful independence from the president. Now SCOTUS crushes that independence ... for seemingly every agency except the Federal Reserve.""SCOTUS will allow Donald Trump to wreck separation of powers and the rule of law, but they draw the line at wrecking capitalism," noted attorney Adam Bonin."This is the most transparently absurd set of twin decisions in Cook and Slaughter," marveled constitutional law professor Anthony Michael Kreis."American democracy has just been Slaughter-ed and Cook-ed," cracked Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch."It's pretty clear they don't want Trump messing with the fed because it has the power to destroy capital if mishandled," stated Harvard law instructor Alejandra Caraballo. "The FTC protects consumers against corporate malfeasance so of course the commissioners can be fired. It's so transparent whose interests are protected by this court ... These decisions are filled with such swiss cheese logic and there are wildly disparate concurrences and dissents for each."

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Supreme Court Rules Trump Can’t Fire Dem Member of Fed Reserve—For Now

The New Republic

6 hours ago

Supreme Court Rules Trump Can’t Fire Dem Member of Fed Reserve—For Now

The Supreme Court has blocked President Trump from firing Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, preserving the central bank’s independence for now. In a 5-4 decision Thursday split across ideological lines, the Supreme Court blocked Trump’s attempt to become the first president to remove a Federal Reserve official since it was created in 1913.Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts and fellow conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the court’s three liberal justices to rein in Trump.Last August, Trump declared that he was booting Cook—the first Black woman on the Federal Reserve board—over claims she committed mortgage fraud with two primary residencies. Cook refused to step down, and sued, stating that “President Trump purported to fire me ‘for cause’ when no cause exists under the law, and he has no authority to do so.” A lower court ruled that Cook could not be dismissed while her case proceeded. The Department of Justice then requested that the Supreme Court stay that ruling, so that Cook could be removed from her position. The Supreme Court refused. “No matter the precise definition of cause, or the scope of our review of any such determination, the President failed to afford Cook the procedural protections to which she was entitled by statute,” wrote Roberts, who wrote the majority’s ruling.The case will now return to a lower court, where Cook will fight to save her job. Cook was appointed by former President Joe Biden, and her term was set to expire in 2038.In a separate decision Monday, the Supreme Court gave the president more power over independent agencies, ruling that Trump had the authority to fire Rebecca Slaughter. The ruling shifted quite a lot of power from Congress to the president, and has ushered in one of the largest changes to the federal government in decades.This story has been updated.

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Supreme Court rules ballots arriving after Election Day can be counted in win for Dems

New York Post

6 hours ago

Supreme Court rules ballots arriving after Election Day can be counted in win for Dems

The Supreme Court upheld a Mississippi law allowing mail-in ballots to be counted up to five days after Election Day so long as they are postmarked by voting day, handing Democrats a massive win heading into the midterm elections.

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GOP bracing for disaster as 'out of sync' Trump ignores party officials’ pleas

Alternet.org

8 hours ago

GOP bracing for disaster as 'out of sync' Trump ignores party officials’ pleas

Republicans are "bracing for a tough election season" heading into the 2026 midterms, according to a new report from The Hill, expressing concerns that President Donald Trump remains "out of sync" with the main issues concerning voters.GOP lawmakers are eager to try and get legislation passed that could address affordability concerns that are weighing heavily on voters' minds, but Trump has continually made their prospects more difficult. In recent months, lawmakers have been frustrated by his remarks about not caring that Americans are struggling against rising costs, as well as his recent insistence that he will not sign a bipartisan affordable housing bill unless Congress passes new voter registration restrictions."Trump’s refusal to sign the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is the latest troubling sign for GOP senators, who have pressed Trump for weeks to pay more personal attention to voters’ concerns about rising costs," The Hill detailed in a Monday morning report. "Instead, Trump’s off-the-cuff statements professing 'love' for higher inflation numbers and declaring he’s not thinking about the financial situations of American families while negotiating an end to the conflict with Iran have GOP candidates bracing for a tough election season.""Living back in the 1970s, I remember I had a car that had about a 12 or 13-gallon gas tank, and when the prices went up, I didn’t have the money to fill it up. I was living literally gas tank to gas tank. We got to acknowledge those situations,” Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, told the outlet. “The American people will give you a lot of latitude in fixing a problem that they themselves are experiencing if they feel like you’re empathetic with what they’re dealing with and you have a plan to address it. Those are the two things we have to work on."Trump's last-minute decision to cancel the signing ceremony for the housing bill reportedly left Senate Majority Leader John Thune "shocked." The president later dismissed concerns from his party about the move, insisting that "no one gives a s—— about housing."Pleas from party officials for Trump to sell voters on the economic accomplishments of his second term have gone largely ignored, with The Hill noting that he is more "preoccupied with cracking down on Republicans who defy him and pushing for Congress to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE America) Act, which has virtually no chance of becoming law.""His priorities are dealing with national security and voter integrity, and the voters’ biggest concerns are the economy," Republican strategist Ron Bonjean told the outlet. "His priorities aren’t syncing up with the voters’ concerns even though he believes he has the best interests of [Americans] at heart."

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A Michigan Dem Just Dropped an AI Plan Even Tougher Than Bernie’s

The New Republic

9 hours ago

A Michigan Dem Just Dropped an AI Plan Even Tougher Than Bernie’s

Abdul El-Sayed, a primary candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan, released an ambitious AI policy platform Monday, joining other progressives like Senator Bernie Sanders in a push for regulation and public ownership. But El-Sayed’s proposal also goes a step further: not just public ownership, but also public governance. Earlier this month, an AI super PAC spent millions to ensure that Alex Bores, the author of a comparatively weak New York state AI accountability law, wouldn’t make it to Congress. El-Sayed’s proposed changes to the AI industry go far further than Bores’s legislation. When asked whether he was worried about industry political action committees targeting his campaign over his new proposals, El-Sayed shrugged it off. “I’m just not afraid of them or AIPAC or any of the others. What’s another hundred-million-dollar super PAC, I guess?”El-Sayed’s policy proposal, which he shared exclusively with The New Republic ahead of its release, has three key components: democratic governance of AI, public ownership of AI companies, and safety requirements. His proposal takes inspiration from Sanders’s American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund bill, proposed earlier this month—and like Sanders’s bill, calls for the creation of a sovereign wealth fund to distribute AI companies’ cash into Americans’ pockets. Sanders envisions establishing that via a one-time 50 percent tax on the country’s biggest AI companies, generating an estimated $7 trillion for social safety net programs, plus a yearly dividend for Americans. El-Sayed proposes using that money to fund education and job training, increase unemployment benefits, and boost small business loans.“I love the senator’s point that we need to own the outcomes of this, in part because it is our data and our knowledge that went into creating it,” El-Sayed said about Bernie’s proposal. They both reason that, since AI has been trained on human writing, research, and collective knowledge, it is a good that belongs to all Americans. “But I think the ownership part needs to go a step further, because we also need some control,” El-Sayed added.To get that control, he proposes democratic governance of AI companies. He proposes that frontier AI labs be chartered as public benefit corporations, legally mandating them to balance public interest with profit margins. Additionally, he suggests that a majority of board seats at these companies should be democratically elected or publicly appointed, rather than selected by shareholders. And, importantly, he calls for major tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta to divest from frontier AI companies. El-Sayed also recommends the establishment of a Food and Drug Administration–style agency to evaluate models before they’re deployed, a ban on AI-generated political media, and requiring companies to work with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, and Federal Emergency Management Agency to protect against biosecurity breaches.El-Sayed’s breezy response to TNR’s question about possible industry retaliation—“What’s another hundred-million-dollar super PAC, I guess?”—references the unrelated money that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, has already spent on the race. Through United Democracy Project PAC, AIPAC has spent over $2 million to support one of El-Sayed’s opponents, Representative Haley Stevens, who is the Democratic establishment’s favored candidate. El-Sayed has repeatedly criticized both the Israeli government and AIPAC’s influence in politics. El-Sayed is also facing State Senator Mallory McMorrow, though polls suggest the race is largely between El-Sayed and Stevens. McMorrow released an AI policy proposal last month that focuses on creating a professional apprenticeship program funded by a token tax, which would charge by the number of tokens used (tokens are the basic units of data that AI models use). Stevens has not released an AI policy plan.Despite a broad consensus among voters that politicians should regulate the AI industry, few bills have actually been passed. Following AI industry super PACs’ massive spending to defeat Alex Bores in retaliation for the RAISE Act, some feared politicians might become even more reluctant to try.El-Sayed is hopeful that American voters are ready to push back against money in politics. “We live in an era right now where people are really smart to the old system of money coming in to buy elections. They see the wool being pulled over their eyes and they don’t like it,” he said.He also doesn’t think politicians have the luxury of time when it comes to regulating AI. “We need to act yesterday,” he said, “and at best, we can act tomorrow.”

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