The Week in News
From the Insurrection to stealing the election, there was a lot of news this week. Here's a smattering.
There’s been an awful lot of news in just the past 48 hours. Here’s a sampling of the things that caught my eye.
US Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) gloriously rips GOP for opposing January 6th Commission
Must-watch. This is how you message.
This seriously cracked me up
Warning: Major Trek allusion.
Trump supporters taint Arizona voting machines
The Arizona Secretary of State says that voting machines in that state have now been irreparably tainted by Trump supporters during the so-called “audit” of the 2020 election being conducted by Trump’s allies. In a nutshell, fanatical Trump supporters had the voting machines behind closed doors, so now we have no idea what they could have done to the machines.
Republicans are preparing to steal the 2024 presidential election
Perry Bacon Jr., an excellent reporter I’ve known professionally in DC for a while, writes a terrifying column in the Washington Post about GOP efforts to steal the next presidential election. Let me share a little:
If Republicans win the governorships of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin next year, taking total control in those key swing states, they could impose all kinds of electoral barriers for the next presidential election. The Republicans are laying the groundwork to refuse to certify a 2024 Democratic presidential victory should the GOP hold a House majority….
]M]oderate Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans either don’t appreciate the direness of the situation or don’t care. Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) seem to value their reputations as being bipartisan more than protecting the voting rights of people who look like me. Republican Sen. Mitt Romney’s (Utah) response to a law clearly designed to make it harder for liberal-leaning people in Georgia to cast ballots was to criticize … the media for covering the law too harshly.
Let me expand on this scenario a bit. It’s a complicated process, but in a nutshell, let’s say Biden wins in 2024 by the electoral votes in two states. Were he not to get the electoral votes in those two states, he’d be under the 270 electoral votes needed for victory. Now, let’s say that Republicans in those states pass a law that says the secretary of state no longer certifies the vote — aka, certifies how many voters voted for each candidate, and thus how many electoral votes each candidate gets from that state — but instead, the certification will be left up to the state legislature, which is always Republican-controlled. Now, it might be too much for even GOP state officials to claim that the Republican won in that state when the Democrat has so many more votes — though I wouldn’t put it past them. But, the GOP could easily say that the election results have so been called into question, that “in all fairness” they just can’t say who won. So, rather than “taking partisan sides,” the state won’t send any electors at all to Washington, DC. That means the Democratic presidential candidate loses those electoral votes, falls below the 270 needed for election, so now neither candidate has the sufficient 270 needed to win. Under that scenario, guess who ends up choosing the president and the vice president? The Senate chooses the VP, and the House chooses the President. Do you think for a minute a GOP-controlled House wouldn’t pick the Republican, regardless of the popular vote and true electoral vote count?
The easiest advocacy campaign in the world
As a political consultant, one of the things that drives me the battiest are advocacy campaigns that are such no-brainers, so easy to win, that it’s incredible liberal groups have been trying, and failing, for decades to win them. To wit: Letting Medicare negotiate drug prices for seniors. Under current federal law, it’s illegal — ILLEGAL — for Medicare to use its market power, some 60 million Americans who are enrolled, to negotiate lower prescription drug prices from drug companies. (European governments negotiate prices all the time, which is why Americans easily pay 5x or more the price for drugs than Europeans do.) So, the US government, and seniors, pay more for drugs because Congress decided to subsidize Big Pharma at the expense of grandma and grandpa.
Such an easy campaign to win. The ads just write themselves. It’s hard to imagine this legal restriction has been in place for two decades now.
Trump charged the Secret Service $40,000 to protect him this past Spring alone
Former GOP Speaker Paul Ryan is fundraising for Trump-critic Adam Kinzinger
It would be nice if Ryan, who has been silent for a long time now, would be more vocal as well.
Sketchy, sketchy, sketchy
There’s a new campaign, funded by God knows who, to punish companies that take ethical stands on issues of the day, such as a violent attempt to overthrow our government, and legislation permitting state legislatures to overrule the voters and pick the loser as president. As CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin points out, it’s really weird that the guy running the campaign won’t tell anyone who’s financing it.
Democratic aide victim of anti-Asian attack
On the heels of data showing a significant rise in anti-Asian hate crimes over the past year, Democratic politico Kurt Bardella was the victim of an anti-Asian attack the other day. Kurt tells his story here.
There’s a new floating park in New York City!
It’s stuff like this I love about NYC.
Are we there yet?
Normally, kidnapping wouldn’t be funny. But this one is. The kindergarteners’ incessant questions drove the kidnapper so bonkers, he let them go within six minutes!
New York is back!
This made me chuckle
This is really bizarre, and also made me chuckle
Watch all the way through, sound on.
And check out my interview with James Carville about how Dems win
This was a lot of fun, and really interesting. Carville is just so brilliant and amusing.
I told you there was a lot! Well, these are my last two days in Chicago, then back to DC for a few months to enjoy the 90-degree heat. Ugh. This happened last year as well, we went from a late spring to full-blown hot summer, and it never let up. I’m also not looking forward to the cicada invasion — they tend to hav a thing for my hair!
See you all next week. And if you like my newsletter, please tell your friends about it on social media.
Thanks, JOHN
Is allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices for seniors really that easy? How many politicians in the House and Senate are beholden to Big Pharma? It's such a huge, powerful industry. They kneecapped Clinton's health care overhaul, they blocked single payer and they've blocked allowing Medicare to negotiated drug prices for decades. With only 50 Dems (and Corey Booker in the pocket of Big Pharma to name one I'm familiar with), won't it still be hard?