Last Call For Ron's Gone Wrong

Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis has declared war on Disney, as well as Orlando-area taxpayers. Oh, and Black voters.

 

The Republican-controlled Florida Senate quickly voted Wednesday to dissolve Disney World’s Reedy Creek Improvement District and for a congressional redistricting map that eliminates two Black districts and tilts the balance of the delegation more Republican.

Both measures were pushed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, which one Democrat called a “hijack” of the Legislature’s duties.

Lawmakers originally came to Tallahassee on Tuesday to take up a congressional map drawn by DeSantis’ office after he vetoed two maps approved by the Legislature during the regular session.

But less than an hour before the special session began, he expanded it to include a bill dissolving Reedy Creek, which independently governs the Orlando resort, and another bill retracting a special carveout that protected Disney from liability in the so-called Big Tech law from 2021.

Just a day later, the Senate voted 23-16 to dissolve Reedy Creek, with Sen. Jeff Brandes of Pinellas Park the only Republican to vote against Sen. Jennifer Bradley’s bill. The Senate voted 24-15 along party lines to approve Bradley’s bill retracting the Disney carveout, which was found unconstitutional by a federal judge.

Critics of the governor say the bills were meant to punish Disney, Florida’s largest single-site employer, for opposing the so-called “don’t say gay” law signed by DeSantis last month.

The bills were filed almost as soon as he called for the expanded session, raising questions about who wrote them and whether the sponsors were forced to carry them for the governor.

Democrats assailed their Republican colleagues for capitulating to DeSantis out of fear of facing primary opponents or having their projects vetoed from the budget rather than acting as the independently elected lawmakers they are supposed to be.

“I didn’t think we were going to acquiesce and let the governor hijack that process,” Sen. Shevrin Jones, a Black Democrat from Miami Gardens, said during the morning debate on the Senate version of the redistricting bill. “What we now see in the Senate we used to only see in the House. We used to be happy when bad bills came to the Senate because that’s where bad bills came to die.”

“If this is going to happen from now on, there is no need to show up,” Jones said.

[ OPINION: Vengeful DeSantis stampedes lawmakers to attack Disney ]

Jones, and other senators, Democrat and Republican, conceded that the redistricting map was going to wind up in court no matter what the outcome. Democrats were especially critical of an amendment added Tuesday that requires all lawsuits challenging the redistricting map to be filed in Leon Circuit Court, an attempt to sidestep the federal court in Tallahassee where most election cases have been challenged and found unconstitutional.

The map DeSantis introduced achieves his stated goal to eliminate the minority-majority District 5 that sprawls across North Florida from Jacksonville to Tallahassee and replaces it with a district that is only 12% Black. It also diminishes the Black voting population in District 10 in Orlando, moving a large number into the Republican-friendly District 11. The map reduces predominantly Black districts from four to two.

 

Tennessee did the same thing with Nashville's congressional district and got away with it.

 

Seriously, all Republicans, and Republican voters care about, is punishing the people who are not on their side, to the point of costing taxpayers millions, and disenfranchising as many Black voters as they can get away with.

 

It's all punishment of those people, all the time.  Anyone who doesn't toe the line is made to suffer by the power of the state. A government of white grievance retribution, for angry white folk, by angry white folk, and the rest of us are increasingly being targeted.

They want that nationally. They're likely to get it.

Going Out To Farm Country

The Democrats finally figured out what I've been saying for over a year now: in order to win rural voters, you have to stop falling for the culture war rope-a-dope and go directly to the Biden infrastructure bill programs that are designed specifically to help rural folks and help them directly with those programs.

The Biden administration is rolling out a new initiative to help rural communities, as Democrats work to halt an erosion of support for the party in rural America.

The new effort, led by the Agriculture Department, will deploy federal staffers next month to rural areas in five states. They'll will help communities there take advantages of federal resources, including funds from the infrastructure law and the covid relief package that President Biden signed early in his presidency.

Several of the places where staffers will be deployed are also expected to be battlegrounds in the midterm elections this fall, including Arizona and Georgia — where Sens. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) are facing tough reelection fights — and districts represented by Reps. Tom O’Halleran (D-Ariz.), Yvette Herrell (R-N.M.) and Sanford Bishop (D-Ga.).

The administration plans to expand the initiative this summer to Puerto Rico and five more states, including Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin, all of which are home to top-tier Senate races.

The White House says political considerations had nothing to do with deciding where to start the program, which the administration eventually hopes to expand to all 50 states.

“We overlaid counties of persistent poverty with the distressed community index and the CDC's social vulnerability index,” a senior administration official told reporters on Tuesday, referring to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “And those three indices created, in essence, a bullseye.”

The administration included “qualitative factors” and aimed for geographic diversity when choosing the second set of communities, the official added. 

 

Show the people what good you can provide for them and their communities. Whocoodanode?

Chloe Maxmin, a Democratic state senator in Maine who won in rural, Republican-leaning districts in 2018 and 2020, said she didn’t think her constituents especially care about bickering in Washington. Instead, they’re troubled by a sense that the Democratic Party doesn’t value them.

“Rural voters are not listened to,” said Maxmin, who wrote a forthcoming book with her campaign manager, Canyon Woodward, on wooing back rural voters. “They’re not heard. Their voices are not integrated into the Democratic Party. And so why should they listen to us?”

What advice does she have for Democrats trying to win in rural areas this fall?

Knock on as many doors as they can, she said.

“I can't even tell you how many times I've showed up at a house and just the simple fact that I drove down someone's dirt driveway, knocked on their door, left my cell phone number — it's just that basic act of showing up wins votes,” she said.

 

And yes, that does include programs to help Black farmers too.

The RIght-Wing Noise Machine, Con't

The problem with GOP disinformation on social media is that one, it's easy to spread, and two, the right-wing disinformation machine rewards those who do spread it willingly and directly. That's the case with Chaya Raichik of NYC, who discovered that retweeting viral political TikTok videos on Twitter made for the perfect format for "owning the libs" and especially her attacks on the LGBTQ+ community. Now, her two-year campaign has gotten her nearly two-thirds of a million followers, including several major influential cable TV and talk radio appearances.

 

Chaya Raichik had been working as a real estate salesperson in Brooklyn when, in early November 2020, she created the account that would eventually become Libs of TikTok.

Under her first handle @shaya69830552, she minimized covid, cast doubt on the election results and promoted a dubious story about a child sex trafficking ring. On Nov. 23, 2020, Raichik changed handles, this time going by @shaya_ray and identifying herself publicly as a real estate investor in Brooklyn. She began doubling down on election fraud conspiracies using QAnon-related language. Early that December, she joked about launching a clothing line titled “voter fraud is real.”

In January 2021, Raichik started talking about traveling to D.C. to support Trump on Jan. 6 at the Stop the Steal rally. When violence broke out at the Capitol that day, she tweeted a play-by-play account claiming to be on the ground. “They were rubber bullets from law enforcement. 1 hit right next to me,” she said. She posted videos from the crowd and spoke of tear gas being deployed nearby. After saying she left the riot, she used Twitter to downplay the event, claiming that it was peaceful compared to a “BLM protest.”

Later that month, Raichik cycled through two more Twitter names, this time focusing on state politicians. First under the handle @ChayaRaichik and the display name “Chaya Raichik,” and then under the new handle, @cuomomustgo, she railed against New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D), calling for him to resign. She promoted the efforts to recall California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). She also began posting about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), calling him “actually brilliant.”

By early last March, she pivoted to a parody account titled @houseplantpotus, pretending to tweet as if she was a houseplant living with President Biden. She revamped her avatar to look like a small shrub with Biden’s face on the leaves. At that point in time she also claimed to be proudly Orthodox Jewish, live in Brooklyn and work in real estate in her Twitter bio.

But the house plant parody never took off. On April 19, 2021, she pivoted her account once again, this time to Libs of TikTok.

Just four months after getting started, Libs of TikTok got its big break: Joe Rogan started promoting the account to the millions of listeners of his hit podcast. He mentioned it several times on the show in August, then again in late September. “Libs of TikTok is one of the greatest f---ing accounts of all time,” he said. With his seal of approval, Raichik’s following skyrocketed.

Libs of TikTok gained more prominence throughout the end of last year, cementing its spot in the right-wing media outrage cycle. Its attacks on the LGBTQ+ community also escalated. By January, Raichik’s page was leaning hard into “groomer” discourse, calling for any teacher who comes out as gay to their students to be “fired on the spot.”

Her anti-trans tweets went especially viral. She called on her followers to contact schools that were allowing “boys in the girls bathrooms” and pushed the false conspiracy theory that schools were installing litter boxes in bathrooms for children who identify as cats. She also purported that adults who teach children about LGBTQ+ identities are “abusive,” that being gender-nonconforming or an ally to the LGBTQ+ community is a “mental illness,” and referred to schools as “government run indoctrination camps” for the LGBTQ+ community.

“Libs of TikTok is shaping our entire political conversation about the rights of LGBTQ people to participate in society,” Drennen said. “It feels like they’re single-handedly taking us back a decade in terms of the public discourse around LGBTQ rights. It’s been like nothing we’ve ever really seen.”

 

A one-woman show, feeding the right-wing outrage beast with instant, viral red meat, day after day. No wonder then she's become a superstar in the red state echo chamber.

And there are thousands and thousands more like her. If you want to know how things got so dark, so quickly around here, it's people like Raichik.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Yesterday I mentioned how Marcus Flowers, the Democrat running against Marjorie Taylor Greene in Georgia in November, had outraised Greene last quarter and I questioned what the point was in a R+28 district. I'm here in KY-4 and it's bad enough being in an R+20 district with Thomas Massie. Cook's PVI number for 2022 estimates that Greene's district is "only" just R+22 now since the redraw. The point is, getting MTG out of Congress isn't going to happen by election.

But what if she was no longer eligible to hold office because of her actions on January 6th, 2020?

A federal judge cleared the way on Monday for a group of Georgia voters to move forward with legal efforts seeking to disqualify Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from running for re-election to Congress, citing her role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

The disqualification effort is based on a constitutional provision adopted after the Civil War that barred members of the Confederacy from holding office. It mirrors several other cases involving Republican members of Congress, whose roles leading up to and during the deadly riot have drawn intense criticism.

The judge, Amy Totenberg, who was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia by President Barack Obama, denied Ms. Greene’s request for a preliminary injunction and temporary restraining order in the high-profile legal feud.

Ms. Greene, 47, who is known for her unflinching loyalty to former President Donald J. Trump and for her clashes with Democrats, has steadfastly denied that she aided and engaged in the attack on the Capitol.

In the 73-page ruling, Judge Totenberg wrote that Ms. Greene had failed to meet the “burden of persuasion” in her request for injunctive relief, which she called an extraordinary and drastic remedy.

“This case involves a whirlpool of colliding constitutional interests of public import,” Judge Totenberg wrote. “The novelty of the factual and historical posture of this case — especially when assessed in the context of a preliminary injunction motion reviewed on a fast track — has made resolution of the complex legal issues at stake here particularly demanding.”

James Bopp Jr., a lawyer for Ms. Greene, said on Monday night that the ruling was flawed and minimized the adverse effect that the disqualification effort was having on Ms. Greene’s right to run for office.

“This is fundamentally antidemocratic,” Mr. Bopp said, maintaining that Ms. Greene had “publicly and vigorously condemned the attack on the Capitol.”

He called the effort to remove her from the ballot part of a well-funded nationwide effort to strip voters of their right to vote for candidates of their choice, with elections determined by “bureaucrats, judges, lawyers and clever legal arguments.”

In her request for an injunction, Ms. Greene argued that it would be impossible to fully resolve the case before Georgia holds its primary elections on May 24. Absentee ballots will start to be mailed on April 25, Ms. Greene’s motion said.

In the ruling, Judge Totenberg determined that Ms. Greene had failed to prove that there was a strong likelihood that she would prevail on the merits of her legal claims. A state administrative judge is scheduled to hear the case on Friday.

 

It's hard to see how Flowers would win still, but getting rid of Greene is still important. I know these days it's not hard to imagine her getting replaced by an even worse Republican, but maybe she gets replaced by a much better Democrat if she can't run at all.

We'll see.

Reading, Writing, 'Rithmatic and Returning Childhood Diseases

As expected, COVID anti-vax stupidity means routine vaccinations in red states for young children are plummeting as wide swaths of the US are setting themselves up for massive outbreaks of measles, polio, mumps, diphtheria and other diseases.

Kids aren’t getting caught up on routine shots they missed during the pandemic, and many vaccination proponents are pointing to Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy as a big reason why.

Public health experts, pediatricians, school nurses, immunization advocates and state officials in 10 states told POLITICO they are worried that an increasing number of families are projecting their attitudes toward the Covid-19 vaccine onto shots for measles, chickenpox, meningitis and other diseases.

That spillover of vaccine hesitancy may also be fueling an uptick in religious exemption requests from parents of school-aged children and is making it more difficult for states to catch up with children who missed immunizations during the pandemic’s early days when families skipped doctor’s appointments, they say.

That has pediatricians, school nurses and public health experts worried that preventable and possibly fatal childhood illnesses, once thought to be a thing of the past, could become more common.

“We just want to keep measles, polio, and all the things we vaccinate against out of the political arena,” said Hugo Scornik, a pediatrician and president of the Georgia Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

He was alarmed by the introduction of several bills in the state legislature in the last year to limit vaccinations, including one that would have ended immunization requirements in schools. Several states considered similar pieces of legislation that would have either removed or whittled away at school vaccination requirements, though none moved forward.

At the beginning of the pandemic, immunization rates for children plummeted. In 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saw a 15 percent drop from pre-pandemic levels in states’ orders for Vaccines for Children, the federal program through which about half the children in the country are immunized. In 2021, order levels were about 7 percent lower than pre-pandemic levels, according to the CDC.

In Florida, where the surgeon general last month announced that healthy children may not benefit from Covid vaccines, 2-year-old routine rates for all immunizations in county-run facilities plummeted from 92.1 percent in 2019 to 79.3 percent in 2021.

In Tennessee, nearly 14 percent fewer vaccine doses were given to children under 2 in 2020 and 2021 than before the pandemic.

And in Idaho, the number of kids who received their first dose of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine by age 2 decreased from roughly 21,000 in 2018 and 2019 to 17,000 in 2021.

Immunization advocates say polarized attitudes toward the Covid-19 shot have made holding and promoting school-based immunization events harder as principals and school nurses navigate the fraught territory of building trust within their communities while encouraging vaccination. That’s making it more difficult for kids to get their shots even when their parents want them vaccinated.

Between 2010 and 2020, the last year for which national data is available, immunization rates in children under 3 for hepatitis B, polio, chickenpox and MMR hovered around 90 percent and were largely unchanged, while rates for the pneumonia and rotavirus vaccine increased significantly. Meanwhile, the percentage of children with no shots grew from 0.6 percent to 1 percent. The CDC is expected next week to release new data on national immunization rates for kindergartners in 2020-2021.

Parents who were hesitant to vaccinate their children before the pandemic have now been joined by people who think the government mishandled the crisis, see Covid-19 vaccine mandates as federal overreach, or are exposed to misinformation about childhood vaccinations, said Rupali Limaye, professor of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“You get a decline in trust towards your government, and people looking for other sources to inform their decision-making process,” she said. “So they go to social media, [where] misinformation is outpacing evidence-based information.”

In other words, expect devastating outbreaks of childhood diseases in the months and years ahead as vaccination rates fall under the rate to sustain herd immunity. Just another feature of Republican disinformation, folks.

 

And hey, remember now that public health emergencies are effectively illegal in most red states.  Legislatures have basically eliminated them.

I'm sure a fucking polio outbreak among Black kids in Alabama or Tennessee will be handled well by Republicans in those states.

Right?

Last Call For Going Judge Mental

The post-Trump GOP playbook has been pretty clear: use federal judges to void all Biden executive orders, and throw the country into chaos. This week's example is a Trump appointee shutting down mask mandates on airlines and other public transportation.

A federal judge in Florida struck down on Monday the Biden administration's mask mandate for airplanes and other public transport methods, and a Biden administration official says the order is no longer in effect while the ruling is reviewed. 

US District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle said the mandate was unlawful because it exceeded the statutory authority of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and because its implementation violated administrative law. 

"The agencies are reviewing the decision and assessing potential next steps," the Biden administration official said Monday night. "In the meantime, today's court decision means CDC's public transportation masking order is not in effect at this time." 

It is unclear if the Justice Department will seek an order halting the ruling and file an appeal.
Just last week, the CDC extended this mask mandate through May 3. The masking requirement applied to airplanes, trains, and other forms of public transportation. 

A Biden administration official familiar with the White House's decision previously told CNN the goal of the extension was to gather more information and understanding of the BA.2 variant of the coronavirus. Covid-19 cases in the US are on the rise, leading universities and the City of Philadelphia to reimplement indoor mask mandates.

 

And the judge in question is a real doozy.

The first part of the judge's 59-page ruling turned on the meaning of the word "sanitation," as it functions in the 1944 statute that gives the federal government the authority -- in its efforts to combat communicable diseases -- to issue regulations concerning "sanitation." 

Mizelle concluded that that the use of the word in the statute was limited to "measures that clean something." 

"Wearing a mask cleans nothing," she wrote. "At most, it traps virus droplets. But it neither 'sanitizes' the person wearing the mask nor 'sanitizes' the conveyance." 

She wrote that the mandate fell outside of the law because "the CDC required mask wearing as a measure to keep something clean -- explaining that it limits the spread of COVID-19 through prevention, but never contending that it actively destroys or removes it." 

Mizelle suggested that the government's implementation of the mandate -- in which non-complying travelers are "forcibly removed from their airplane seats, denied board at the bus steps, and turned away at the train station doors" -- was akin to "detention and quarantine," which are not contemplated in the section of the law in question, she said. 

"As a result, the Mask Mandate is best understood not as sanitation, but as an exercise of the CDC's power to conditionally release individuals to travel despite concerns that they may spread a communicable disease (and to detain or partially quarantine those who refuse)," she wrote. "But the power to conditionally release and detain is ordinarily limited to individuals entering the United States from a foreign country."

She added that the mandate also did not fit with a section of the law that would allow for detention of a traveler if he was, upon examination, found to infected.

"The Mask Mandate complies with neither of these subsections," the judge said. "It applies to all travelers regardless of their origins or destinations and makes no attempt to sort based on their health."

 

If you're wondering where this deliberately obtuse misunderstanding of "sanitation" is coming from, understand that Judge Mizelle was solely appointed because she is the wife of former Trump Homeland Security General Counsel Chad Mizelle.

You know, the Title 42 guy. And surprise, Mizelle was involved in Trump's coup attempt, as the lawyer who evaluated Trump's plans to use DHS to seize voting machines across the country as "evidence of voting fraud."

His wife, by-the-by, was deemed Not Qualified by the American Bar Association because she never tried a case, never argued a case, and never defended a case in any court, civil or criminal.

The GOP Senate then easily approved her. They don't care if the judge isn't qualified, they care if they can bullshit enough to make their legal arguments justifiable, and they get to kill as many people as they can in the process.

Monsters, all of them.

Greene Versus Green

Don't look now, but Georgia GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who exists only to piss off people in America, is discovering that her racist tirades are only empowering her challenger.

Friday’s deadline to report fundraising for the first three months of 2022 has given us more information to sift through in some of Georgia’s most contested federal races.

We have a bigger story on the Senate contest here, along with a takeout on the growing wave of spending. A closer look at the spending revealed a few other highlights:

• Democratic challenger Marcus Flowers outraised U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District. He raised $2.4 million in the first three months of 2022. compared to her $1.1 million. And Greene spent about $300,000 more than she raised during the quarter. Still, she has $3 million in cash on hand, compared to Flowers’ $1.9 million. She has raised a total of $8.4 million for her reelection bid, while he’s raised about $7.1 million.
• Republican frontrunner Herschel Walker’s report included about $20,000 in small-dollar “anonymous” donations. The poultry company founder also reported collecting a $10,000 contribution from a Kentucky Fried Chicken political organization a few weeks after he delivered a speech at the group’s March convention.
• Walker’s got other plenty of other financial support beyond his first-quarter haul. The 34N22 PAC raised $3.25 million in the first three months of the year, spent about $440,000 and ended with about $3.3 million in its account.
• U.S. Rep. Lucy McBath continues to outfundraise fellow incumbent U.S. Rep. Carolyn Bourdeaux in the 7th District. McBath reported $804,497.21 in receipts during the quarter, ending it with $2.9 million in the bank. Bourdeaux raised $592,579 and had $2.1 million in cash on hand. The third Democrat in the race, state Rep. Donna McLeod, reported that she didn’t raise or spend anything -- not a penny -- during the first three months of 2022.
• We had early word last week that Rich McCormick raised more than $600,000 during the quarter and ended it with $1.1 million in the bank. Now we can say that he continues to lead the GOP candidates in the 6th District. Jake Evans raised $411,163.18 during the period, including a $200,000 loan from the candidate to the campaign. He does have a bit more than McCormick in cash on hand: $1.2 million. Former state Rep. Meagan Hanson collected $117,109.00 during the period, including the $50,000 she loaned to her campaign. She has $299,432 in cash on hand.

Among the campaign expenses U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene reported for the last quarter was $10,000 to controversial California attorney John Eastman’s Constitutional Counsel Group, the Business Insider reports.

Eastman was at the center of efforts by former President Donald Trump to overturn the 2020 election results, pushing the idea that former Vice President Mike Pence had the authority to block Joe Biden’s certification as president.

The Business Insider reached out to Greene’s campaign about the payment, which was listed as unspecified “legal expenses.”

“Dr. Eastman is one of the leading constitutional attorneys in the country. When we need advice on significant constitutional issues, we have occasionally sought his counsel,” a campaign spokesperson said. “The particular issues for which we sought his advice are protected by attorney-client privilege, however.”

 

Here's the cold, hard reality of this race however:  

GA-14 is a R+28 district.

This is like Republicans raising funds to beat AOC in the Bronx or Yvette Clark in Brooklyn, and frankly, I'm upset that Marcus Flowers is raising this much money only to lose by 30 or 40 points in November. It's the same problem with Charles Booker here in KY running against Rand Paul.

 

Our vote matters, we can still win, but campaign money is not what's going to make the difference.

See, we didn't learn our lesson with Amy McGrath or Jaime Harrison or Sara Gideon. Throwing millions, sometimes tens of millions, at a race and outraising the Republican pain in the ass incumbent doesn't mean you'll win, and that money is better used to help out more winnable races. We were extremely lucky that we got a second shot at both of Georgia's Senate races and even luckier still to win them both.

And we won in Georgia because of Stacey Abrams and the best Democratic ground game in the country.

That is where the money needs to go, not to campaign coffers.

Vote like your country depends on it, because it does.

The Galtian Republic Of Rick Scott

Former Florida GOP Governor and now Senator Rick Scott really doesn't give a shit if you think he's a crook (he's a Medicare fraudster who scammed the government of billions as a hospital chain CEO) who became the richest man in the Senate, he's here openly saying the GOP's plan is to destroy Medicare and Social Security and raise taxes on tens of millions of working-class Americans to make them "pay their fair share" while wrecking all federal protections on civil rights, voting rights, clear air and water, and leaving everything to the states to decide.

Florida Sen. Rick Scott has been publicly dressed down by Republican leader Mitch McConnell, privately rebuked by his colleagues and repeatedly accused of running the National Republican Senatorial Committee in a way that benefits his own future over the candidates he was hired to get elected.

He has directed a sizable share of his fundraising as NRSC chair to his own accounts, while shifting digital revenue away from Senate campaigns and buying ads promoting himself that look all but identical to spots he does for the national committee.

But during the seven weeks of turmoil since Scott dropped a provocative conservative policy bomb on an unsuspecting party — a plan that called for tax increases and expiration dates for all federal laws, including those establishing Social Security and Medicare — he has not once expressed regret. Instead, the former hospital chain CEO and two-term governor, the richest man in the Senate, argues that he owes his detractors nothing.

“My whole life has been people telling me that, you know, you’re doing it the wrong way. You can’t, you shouldn’t be doing this,” he said in a recent interview at NRSC headquarters. “I’ve been up here for three years. Do you know how many people have come to me and asked me, before they vote, what my opinion is on something and whether it’s good for my state? That would be zero.”

Barbs like these from the inner sanctum of GOP leadership toward his fellow senators and political operatives have cut unexpected fissures into what appears to be a banner election year for Republicans, who are a single seat away from majority control of the Senate. Private grumbling about how Scott has turned the NRSC into the “National Rick Scott Committee” has become widespread enough in some Republican circles that other jokes have been added. “All this, for four percent in Iowa,” is the punchline of one about the harm he could do to Republican fortunes in November in pursuit of national ambitions.

During a Feb. 29 meeting with Senate leadership in McConnell’s office, other senators brought articles that showed members being attacked for various parts of his plan, particularly the tax provision and another imposing term limits. They chastised him in round-robin fashion for the unnecessary headache he had created, said people familiar with the meeting, who like others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

Scott answered days later with a Wall Street Journal op-ed — “Why I’m Defying Beltway Cowardice” — and a March 31 speech at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

“Bring it on,” he said there.

Scott is going after Mitch's job and telling everyone with a bullhorn that he's going to erase federalism and rewind the clock back 100 years. laws, the whole thing since the New Deal vanishes and we're back to robber barons busting unions and strikes with Pinkertons and federal troops and a only a third of the country being eligible to vote.

He also may be the Democrats' best hope for keeping Congress.

The Fires Of Alexandria

They've come for abortion, for LGBTQ+ equality, for civil rights, for voting rights, for public education, now the GOP is coming to destroy your county library branch. 

 

In early November, an email from a citizen dropped into the inbox of Judge Ron Cunningham, the silver-haired head chair of the governing body of Llano County in Texas’s picturesque Hill Country. The subject line read “Pornographic Filth at the Llano Public Libraries.”

“It came to my attention a few weeks ago that pornographic filth has been discovered at the Llano library,” wrote Bonnie Wallace, a 54-year-old local church volunteer. “I’m not advocating for any book to be censored but to be RELOCATED to the ADULT section. … It is the only way I can think of to prohibit censorship of books I do agree with, mainly the Bible, if more radicals come to town and want to use the fact that we censored these books against us.”

Wallace had attached an Excel spreadsheet of about 60 books she found objectionable, including those about transgender teens, sex education and race, including such notable works as “Between the World and Me,” by author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, an exploration of the country’s history written as a letter to his adolescent son. Not long after, the county’s chief librarian sent the list to Suzette Baker, head of one of the library’s three branches.

“She told me to look at pulling the books off the shelf and possibly putting them behind the counter. I told them that was censorship,” Baker said.

Wallace’s list was the opening salvo in a censorship battle that is unlikely to end well for proponents of free speech in this county of 21,000 nestled in rolling hills of mesquite trees and cactus northwest of Austin.

Leaders have taken works as seemingly innocuous as the popular children’s picture book “In the Night Kitchen” by Maurice Sendak off the shelves, closed library board meetings to the public and named Wallace the vice chair of a new library board stacked with conservative appointees — some of whom did not even have library cards.

With these actions, Llano joins a growing number of communities across America where conservatives have mounted challenges to books and other content related to race, sex, gender and other subjects they deem inappropriate. A movement that started in schools has rapidly expanded to public libraries, accounting for 37 percent of book challenges last year, according to the American Library Association. Conservative activists in several states, including Texas, Montana and Louisiana have joined forces with like-minded officials to dissolve libraries’ governing bodies, rewrite or delete censorship protections, and remove books outside of official challenge procedures.

“The danger is that we start to have information and books that only address one viewpoint that are okayed by just one certain group,” said Mary Woodward, president-elect of the Texas Library Association.

“We lose that diversity of thought and diversity of ideas libraries are known for — and only represent one viewpoint that is the loudest,” said Woodward, noting that there have been an estimated 17 challenges leveled at public libraries in Texas recently and that she expects many more.

Leila Green Little, a parent and board member of the Llano County Library System Foundation, said her anti-censorship group obtained dozens of emails from country officials that reveal the outsize influence a small but vocal group of conservative Christian and tea party activists wielded over the county commissioners to reshape the library system to their own ideals.

In one of the emails, which were obtained through a public records request and shared with The Washington Post, Cunningham seemed to question whether public libraries were even necessary.

“The board also needs to recognize that the county is not mandated by law to provide a public library,” Cunningham wrote to Wallace in January.

 

Indeed, here in Kentucky, the latest GOP-controlled state legislative session has handed complete control of non-partisan county library boards solely to elected, partisan county judge-executives, who would determine board members. And any project more than $1 million would require Kentucky's county fiscal courts, who could simply block all new library projects.

We're now officially in the era of "Do we really need libraries when Google is available?"

And uneducated populace is easier to control, of course.  That's the point.

Sunday Long Read: The Right-Wing Slime Machine

Millions upon millions are being spent by a Republican dark money group with one purpose and one purpose only: to attack every single nominee Joe Biden has put forth that requires Senate approval, with the goal to do whatever it takes to convince at least one Democrat to sink them...because one Democratic senator is all it takes. 

During the autos-da-fé that now pass for Supreme Court confirmation hearings in the U.S. Senate, it’s common for supporters of a nominee to dismiss attacks from the opposing party as mere partisanship. But, during the recent hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson, Andrew C. McCarthy—a Republican former federal prosecutor and a prominent legal commentator at National Review—took the unusual step of denouncing an attack from his own side. When Republican senators, including Josh Hawley and Marsha Blackburn, began accusing Jackson of having been a dangerously lenient judge toward sex offenders, McCarthy wrote a column calling the charge “meritless to the point of demagoguery.” He didn’t like Jackson’s judicial philosophy, but “the implication that she has a soft spot for ‘sex offenders’ who ‘prey on children’ . . . is a smear.”

In the end, the attacks failed to diminish public support for Jackson, and her poised responses to questioning helped secure her nomination, by a vote of 53–47. But the fierce campaign against her was concerning, in part because it was spearheaded by a new conservative dark-money group that was created in 2020: the American Accountability Foundation. An explicit purpose of the A.A.F.—a politically active, tax-exempt nonprofit charity that doesn’t disclose its backers—is to prevent the approval of all Biden Administration nominees.

While the hearings were taking place, the A.A.F. publicly took credit for uncovering a note in the Harvard Law Review in which, they claimed, Jackson had “argued that America’s judicial system is too hard on sexual offenders.” The group also tweeted that she had a “soft-on-sex-offender” record during her eight years as a judge on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. As the Washington Post and other outlets stated, Jackson’s sentencing history on such cases was well within the judicial mainstream, and in line with a half-dozen judges appointed by the Trump Administration. When Jackson defended herself on this point during the hearings, the A.A.F. said, on Twitter, that she was “lying.” The group’s allegation—reminiscent of the QAnon conspiracy, which claims that liberal élites are abusing and trafficking children—rippled through conservative circles. Tucker Carlson repeated the accusation on his Fox News program while a chyron declared “jackson lenient in child sex cases.” Marjorie Taylor Greene, the extremist representative from Georgia, called Jackson “pro-pedophile.”

Mudslinging is hardly new to American politics. In 1800, a campaign surrogate for Thomas Jefferson called Jefferson’s opponent, John Adams, “hermaphroditical”; Adams’s supporters predicted that if Jefferson were elected President he would unleash a reign of “murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest.” Neither the Democratic nor Republican Party is above reproach when it comes to engaging in calumny, and since at least 1987, when President Ronald Reagan unsuccessfully nominated Robert Bork to be a Justice, the fights over Supreme Court nominees have been especially nasty. Yet the A.A.F.’s approach represents a new escalation in partisan warfare, and underscores the growing role that secret spending has played in deepening the polarization in Washington.

Rather than attack a single candidate or nominee, the A.A.F. aims to thwart the entire Biden slate. The obstructionism, like the Republican blockade of Biden’s legislative agenda in Congress, is the end in itself. The group hosts a Web site, bidennoms.com, that displays the photographs of Administration nominees it has targeted, as though they were hunting trophies. And the A.A.F. hasn’t just undermined nominees for Cabinet and Court seats—the kinds of prominent people whose records are usually well known and well defended. It’s also gone after relatively obscure, sub-Cabinet-level political appointees, whose public profiles can be easily distorted and who have little entrenched support. The A.A.F., which is run by conservative white men, has particularly focussed on blocking women and people of color. As of last month, more than a third of the twenty-nine candidates it had publicly attacked were people of color, and nearly sixty per cent were women.

Among the nominees the group boasts of having successfully derailed are Saule Omarova, a nominee for Comptroller of the Currency, and Sarah Bloom Raskin, whom Biden named to be the vice-chair for supervision of the Federal Reserve Board. David Chipman, whom the President wanted to run the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and David Weil, Biden’s choice for the Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor, both saw their nominations founder in the wake of A.A.F. attacks. Currently, the group is waging a negative campaign against Lisa Cook, who, if confirmed, would become the first Black woman to serve on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors.

Tom Jones, the A.A.F.’s founder and executive director, is a longtime Beltway operative specializing in opposition research. Records show that over the years he has worked for several of the most conservative Republicans to have served in the Senate, including Ron Johnson, of Wisconsin; Ted Cruz, of Texas; Jim DeMint, of South Carolina; and John Ensign, of Nevada, for whom Jones was briefly a legislative director. In 2016, Jones ran the opposition-research effort for Cruz’s failed Presidential campaign. When I asked Jones for an interview, through the A.A.F.’s online portal, he replied, “Ms. Meyers . . . Go pound sand.” Citing an article that I had written debunking attacks on Bloom Raskin from moneyed interests, including the A.A.F., he said, “You are a liberal hack masquerading as an investigative journalist—and not a very good one.” Jones subsequently posted this comment on his group’s Twitter account, along with my e-mail address and cell-phone number.

A decade ago, Bill Dauster, a Democrat who is now the chief counsel to the Senate Budget Committee, helped Jones organize a bipartisan Torah study group for Jewish congressional staffers. Dauster recalls him as “soft-spoken and cordial,” and finds it hard to reconcile the man he knew with Jones’s current persona. “I find what he appears to have done quite distasteful,” he said.

In interviews with right-wing media outlets, Jones hasn’t been shy about his intentions. Last April, he told Fox News, which called A.A.F.’s tactics “controversial,” that his group wants to “take a big handful of sand and throw it in the gears of the Biden Administration,” making it “as difficult as possible” for the President and his allies on Capitol Hill “to implement their agenda.” When asked why his group was bothering to attack sub-Cabinet-level appointees, he explained that people in “that second tier are really the folks who are going to do the day-to-day work implementing the agenda.”

Last year, an A.A.F. member infiltrated a Zoom training session for congressional staffers about the ethics rules surrounding earmarks—pet spending projects that lawmakers write into the federal budget. The infiltrator asked leading questions during the meeting and then posted a recording of it online. The attempted sting backfired: nothing incriminating was said, and the A.A.F.’s underhanded tactics became the story. Evan Hollander, then the spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee, told The Hill that, “for a group that purports to concern itself with ethics, using fake identities, misrepresenting themselves as Congressional staff and surreptitiously recording meetings is hypocritical in the extreme.”

Jones made no apologies. He told Fox News, “I’m never doing anything illegal. But just because it’s impolite to log into an earmark-training seminar and offend the morals of Capitol Hill staff, that’s not going to stop me from doing it.” He added, “If I’ve got to trail someone on the ground to find out what they’re doing, I’m totally going to do it. Because people who are making decisions need to have this information—they need to understand who they are trusting with the reins of government. And sometimes that means we will use unorthodox methods.” 

 

And once again, the target is to create whatever is needed to cause enough of an uproar to sink a Biden appointee, and again, all they have to do is swing one Democratic senator for whatever reason.

Last Call For Moose Lady Blues

With the death of long-time Alaska GOP cash sponge Rep. Don Young, Sarah Palin is the by far most well-known name running for his spot in a crowd of dozens of comers, but that doesn't mean she's going to win.

The Matanuska-Susitna Valley, a lush patch of the state where the lakes are fed by glacial meltwater, is where Sarah Palin launched her political career three decades ago. In the heart of the state’s conservative movement, she rose from city council member to small-town mayor, before beating a sitting Republican governor and becoming the GOP nominee for vice president in 2008.

But to construction contractor Jesse Sumner, who was born and raised in the valley and in 2018 was elected to the local borough assembly on a platform of fiscal conservatism and gun rights, that’s all a distant memory overshadowed by what he sees as years of political neglect. Now, as Palin seeks a comeback in a run for Alaska’s only U.S. House seat, she won’t be getting his support.

“I think maybe she left us behind somewhere on the way to fame,” said Sumner, who has supported the candidacy of one of Palin’s opponents since last fall and is not changing his plans. He complained that Palin — who has spent much of the past decade as a right-wing celebrity, bouncing between reality TV, cable news punditry and the Trump movement — hasn’t been involved in Alaska politics since leaving office in 2009.

When she did show up at a Republican fundraiser last year, “everybody was surprised to see her there,” Sumner said.

Such sentiments, which voters and activists across the state shared in recent interviews, loom over Palin’s campaign for an open seat. It’s the first time in five decades that Republican Rep. Don Young, who died last month, won’t be on the ballot. The top four vote-getters in June’s nonpartisan primary will move on to a special election in August under a recently implemented ranked-choice voting system. Nearly 50 candidates have entered the race.

But none are as well-known outside Alaska as Palin, making the race a test of power of national political celebrity in a state where local relationships and reputations have long been crucial. She announced her campaign on April 1, two weeks after Young’s death, filing the paperwork to run minutes before the state’s deadline.

The campaign has also become a barometer of the influence of former president Donald Trump. Years before Trump was elected president, Palin embodied a similar brand of combative politics that fired up far right voters and alarmed many in GOP leadership. She supported him in 2016 and he has endorsed her this year, even as many key Republicans in the state have gone in a different direction.

When asked about Palin’s candidacy, Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski (daughter to Frank Murkowski, the governor Palin once defeated) touted the other four dozen candidates and said she couldn’t name the last time she saw Palin in Alaska, because it had been “years.” Murkowski also faces reelection this year, with Trump backing her main rival, Kelly Tshibaka.

Palin’s campaign did not grant requests for an interview with her. The campaign provided a written statement from an unnamed campaign adviser saying Palin “believes that America is at a tipping point and that the hard-working men and women of Alaska deserve a champion in Washington to fight for them against the destructive policies of the far left.” The statement echoed Trump in mentioning “fake news” and disdaining “Washington elites.”

But there are few signs of a detailed policy platform from Palin. Her campaign statement said she wants to help Alaskans “lead the next energy renaissance.” Her campaign website is thin on specifics and, instead, showcases photos of her in fishing bibs, horseback riding, and at Trump rallies. Her Twitter feed touts endorsements from national Republican figures such as former speaker of the house Newt Gingrich and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley.

Palin may still be crafting her strategy and message with only seven weeks until the primary, but University of Alaska Fairbanks political science professor Amy Lovecraft said the House campaign is surprisingly quiet in terms of advertising and events. She attributes that to the scramble caused by Young’s sudden death and adapting to the new nonpartisan primary format. Plus, she said, candidates with high name recognition may be biding their time, assuming they will make it through the first round.

“The people who think they have the best shot at Young’s seat may be saving their money for a knockdown, drag-out election later,” Lovecraft said.

 

Between this and endorsing J.D. Vance in Ohio's Senate race (and Herschel Walker in Georgia's Senate race), Donald Trump is larding the galley with real losers. We'll see if any of them can get past a primary.

Last Call For Time For Some Traffic Problems On The Border, Con't

The backlash over Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott's new truck inspection regime on incoming trucks from Mexico was so massive this week that Abbott has now dropped the program completely.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Friday repealed his traffic-clogging immigration order that backed up commercial trucks at the U.S.-Mexico border, after a week of intensifying backlash and fears of deepening economic losses.

The Republican governor dropped his new rules that had required all commercial trucks from Mexico to undergo extra inspections to curb the flow of migrants and drugs and ratcheted up a fight with the Biden administration over immigration policy.

Some truckers reported waiting more than 30 hours to cross. Others blocked one of the world’s busiest trade bridges in protest.

Abbott, who is up for reelection in November and has made the border his top issue, fully lifted the inspections after reaching agreements with neighboring Mexican states that he says outline new commitments to border security. The last one was signed Friday with the governor of Tamaulipas, who this week said the inspections were overzealous and created havoc.

When Abbott first ordered the inspections, he did not say lifting them was conditional on such arrangements with Mexico.

Pressure was building on Abbott to retreat as gridlock on the border worsened and frustration mounted. The American Trucking Association called the inspections “wholly flawed, redundant and adding considerable weight on an already strained supply chain.”

The U.S.-Mexico border is crucial to the U.S. economy and more of it is in Texas — roughly 1,200 miles (1,931 kilometers) — than any other state. The United States last year imported $390.7 billion worth of goods from Mexico, second only to China.

Abbott began the inspections after the Biden administration said pandemic-related restrictions on claiming asylum at the border would be lifted May 23. He called the inspections a “zero tolerance policy for unsafe vehicles” smuggling migrants. He said Texas would take several steps in response to the end of the asylum restrictions, which is expected to lead to an increase in migrants coming to the border.

State troopers inspected more than 6,000 commercial vehicles over the past week, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety. Nearly one in four trucks were pulled off the road for what the agency described as serious violations that included defective tires and brakes.

The agency made no mention of the inspections turning up migrants or drugs.

 

So the inspections failed to turn up any drugs or human trafficking that the Feds missed, which was ostensibly the whole point of the exercise, but it instead forced three Mexican governors into unenforceable agreements and cost the country at least $150,000,000 and probably closer to several billion in economic damage, all of which he can now blame on Biden.

Let's see, there's a legal term for someone who forces change in government policy through damage or disruption to systems, isn't there?

Oh right, terrorism.

This was a terrorist attack that cost billions.

Greg Abbott should be in a cell awaiting trial.

The Big Lie, Con't

Another hard reminder that Republicans besides Trump and his White House flunkies were actively working to overthrow the election, and that includes multiple sitting GOP members of Congress. That includes Utah GOP Sen. Mike Lee and Texas GOP Rep. Chip Roy, who actively plotted with Trump WH Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to declare Trump the winner fraudulently leading up to January 6th, 2021.

In the weeks between the 2020 election and the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, almost 100 text messages from two staunch GOP allies of then-President Donald Trump reveal an aggressive attempt to lobby, encourage and eventually warn the White House over its efforts to overturn the election, according to messages obtained by the House select committee and reviewed by CNN.

The texts, which have not been previously reported, were sent by Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah and GOP Rep. Chip Roy of Texas to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. The text exchanges show that both members of Congress initially supported legal challenges to the election but ultimately came to sour on the effort and the tactics deployed by Trump and his team. 

"We're driving a stake in the heart of the federal republic," Roy texted Meadows on January 1. That text was first released in December by the House select committee and described as being written by a House Freedom Caucus member. Roy's authorship has not been previously reported. 

When situated in the overall timeline of events between the election and January 6, the series of texts from Lee and Roy provide new details about how two Trump allies went from fierce advocates of the former President's push to overturn Joe Biden's win to disheartened bystanders. By January 3, Lee was texting Meadows that the effort "could all backfire badly." 

But shortly after the election, both men were encouraging Trump to keep fighting.
In a series of texts to Meadows on November 7, Lee offered his "unequivocal support for you to exhaust every legal and constitutional remedy at your disposal to restore Americans faith in our elections." 

Lee went on: "This fight is about the fundamental fairness and integrity of our election system. The nation is depending upon your continued resolve. Stay strong and keep fighting Mr. President." 

Also on November 7, Roy wrote to Meadows, "We need ammo. We need fraud examples. We need it this weekend." 

In a statement to CNN, Lee's communications director, Lee Lonsberry, said, "I'd like to highlight that Senator Lee has been fully transparent," pointing to how Lee had called for an investigation into claims of fraud in the 2020 election but ultimately recognized Biden as president-elect and voted to certify the electoral results on January 6. 

 

The heart of the conspiracy here consisted of the pleas by Lee, Roy, and several other Republicans for Trump to get alternate slates of electors in order to make the election theft workable, and to use the chaos of January 6th as cover to initiate the plan to steal the White House.

 

The slates of electors didn't arrive in time, and when they were created, they were ludicrously illegitimate. 

The problem now is Trump has his own slate of GOP Secretaries of State who will steal the electoral votes for him in 2024. Lee, Roy, Trump, and the rest of the GOP were unable to steal the election in 2020 because states didn't play ball.

In 2024, they'll declare Trump the winner before the voting even happens.

 

The Great Debate Debate Debate

The Republican party is packing up from any future presidential debates and is going home.

The Republican National Committee voted unanimously on Thursday to withdraw from the Commission on Presidential Debates, saying the group that has run the debates for decades was biased and refused to enact reforms.

"We are going to find newer, better debate platforms to ensure that future nominees are not forced to go through the biased CPD in order to make their case to the American people," the committee's chairperson, Ronna McDaniel, said in a statement.

The RNC's action requires Republican candidates to agree in writing to appear only in primary and general election debates sanctioned by the committee.

The nonprofit commission, founded in 1987 to codify the debates as a permanent part of presidential elections, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It was unclear what format future RNC-backed debates would take or whether they would take place as often as in recent decades.

The move, which followed months of wrangling between the RNC and the commission, will potentially deprive voters of seeing Republican and Democratic candidates on the same stage.

Millions of Americans usually watch the presidential debates, and many viewers say they help them make up their minds about whom to vote for, according to research by the Pew Research Center.

The Democratic National Committee, the RNC's counterpart for President Joe Biden's party, accused Republicans of trying to hide from voters.

"Voters can count on hearing from President Biden and Vice President (Kamala) Harris, who are proud of their records," DNC chairperson Jaime Harrison said in a statement.

 

It's true, and Democrats need to be blasting Republicans for the next two years over this.  As Steve M. says, if Democrats don't strike now on this, Republicans will set up their own actually biased FOX News, Newsmax, and OANN debate "moderators" and force Democrats into playing their game.

And I think they should say now that they intend to continue working with the Commission on Presidential Debates, because the CPD has been the gold standard since 1987. As I said in January, the Democratic nominee should agree to debate the Republican and also encourage participation by the better-known minor candidates, and should go ahead with the debate, along with just the Green and Libertarian candidates if necessary, if (when) the Republican doesn't show up. Make Trump or DeSantis look like the one who's afraid to debate.

But as I also said in January, Democrats won't do this. Out of fear that they'll look like debate dodgers, they'll allow themselves to be dragged into the GOP's process and ultimately agree to it.

I hope I'm wrong about that.

 

 I think DNC chair Jaime Harrison is smart enough not to fall for this.  We'll see.

Last Call For Ad-Vance Notice

 It looks like Donald Trump will be endorsing J.D. Vance in Ohio's Senate Primary after all, and now the question is this late in the game, with the primary less than 3 weeks away, will it be enough to get Vance out of his single-digit poll showing?

Former President Trump is planning to endorse J.D. Vance in Ohio's crowded senate GOP primary, according to three sources with knowledge of his decision.

In recent days, Trump began calling donors and advisers to get their opinion endorsing on the “Hillbilly Elegy” author, but he held off under intense pressure from the rival Republican campaigns of Josh Mandel and Jane Timken, the sources said.

"The Mandel people hit the roof," one Republican with knowledge of the discussions told NBC News, noting that Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan tried to dissuade Trump on behalf of Mandel, whom the congressman supports.

The May 3 primary is winner take all — meaning the candidate with the plurality wins.

Though Trump's press shop had already written up an endorsement of Vance, a source close to Mandel’s campaign said Thursday that it threw up a last-minute obstacle for the former president to consider: an internal Republican poll conducted by his campaign showing Mandel in front with 33 percent of the vote, followed by Matt Dolan and Mike Gibbons tied at 15 percent. Vance and Jane Timken were tied at 9 percent in the Mandel poll.

The poll showed that, even with Trump's endorsement, Vance rose to 15 percent support but was still in a three-way tie for second with Mandel marginally in the lead at 19 percent — a sign that Trump's endorsement had weight but was not determinative.

 

Trump will be in Ohio on April 23, in which case it's now no longer a mystery as to who he is going to endorse.

So yeah, it's going to be fun times in Ohio.