Close to 1,000 migrant children separated by Trump yet to be reunited with parents
February 02, 2023
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Dems could keep their Senate majority for 'the rest of the decade,' warns chair of the Senate GOP’s campaign arm
March 24, 2023
Although Democrats narrowly increased their U.S. Senate majority in the 2022 midterms, they are worried about keeping it in 2024. Some Democratic strategists fear that if centrist Sen. Kyrsten Sinema runs for reelection as an independent next year and goes up against Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego — who is seeking his party's nomination in that Senate race — she could become a spoiler. Another fear is that if Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) doesn't run for reelection, they will have a hard time finding another Democrat who can win in that deep red state.
But Republicans have their worries about the U.S. Senate as well. National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) Chairman Steve Daines (R-Montana) fears that Democrats will keep their Senate majority for the rest of the 2020s if Republicans do not flip that chamber in 2024.
During a late March appearance on the conservative podcast "Ruthless," Daines told fellow Republicans, "We either deliver a majority in '24, or we are in the minority…. for the rest of the decade. That has profound consequences."
Daines argued that 2024 is the Republican Party's best chance to retake the U.S. Senate because there will be no Democrats running for reelection in "red states" in either 2026 or 2028. Democratic senators seeking reelection in 2024 in states that former President Donald Trump won in 2020 include Ohio's Sherrod Brown and Montana's Jon Tester.
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"It is a generational moment," Daines commented. And he urged Republicans to avoid picking primary candidates who will fare poorly in the general election.
"We've got to find candidates that can win not just primary elections, but can win general elections," Daines told listeners.
In the 2022 midterms, Senate candidates endorsed by Trump lost in Arizona (Blake Masters), Pennsylvania (Dr. Mehmet Oz) and Georgia (Herschel Walker). And Pennsylvania could be problematic for Republicans again in 2024.
Centrist three-term Democratic Sen. Bob Casey, Jr. is up for a fourth term, and far-right State Sen. Doug Mastriano — the conspiracy theorist and QAnon ally who lost Pennsylvania's gubernatorial race by double digits in 2022 — appears to have a good shot at winning his party's nomination if he decides to run.
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Every queer person knows what it’s like to be stuck at a holiday dinner next to someone who makes us cringe when they speak.
Sometimes they don’t say anything outright offensive — nothing that would get bleeped on network television — but often what comes out of their mouths represents a relic of a more troubling time for us.
That’s the feeling I get reading Jeff Brindle’s emails.
Brindle is the executive director of the Election Law Enforcement Commission, which is tasked with keeping an eye on politicians and making sure they disclose their donors properly, don’t spend campaign cash illegally, and update the public on their finances.
He’s come under fire recently because of an email he sent to a staffer in October mocking National Coming Out Day. State officials said in a memo the New Jersey Monitor obtained this week that the email was a blatant violation of the state’s anti-discrimination policy, and Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration has made moves to oust Brindle over it.
When I first read it, I thought, well, I’d probably complain to someone if my boss sent me this, but I might be satisfied if they got a reminder about what’s appropriate to say in work emails. I don’t know if I’d push for them to be fired.
But Brindle didn’t keep his snark about the LGBTQ community confined to that one email, according to a batch obtained via the Open Public Records Act by CJ Griffin, a transparency advocate and attorney who has represented the New Jersey Monitor.
In June, state officials sent a staff-wide email noting it was Pride month and suggesting employees consider adding their pronouns to their email signature. Brindle forward to an unknown person with this comment: “Give me a break.”
To a staffer who shared a story about a gay pride stunt courtesy of Burger King in Austria, Brindle wrote, “Unbelievable.”
He shared a July story from conservative news site Town Hall about a trans woman who impregnated two inmates in New Jersey’s women’s prison. He wrote, “We truly are living through insane times.”
In July, Breitbart wrote about Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas — a transgender woman whose participation in women’s sports made her a nationwide target — not being named NCAA’s woman of the year. Brindle sent the link to a staffer. “Lia lost this one,” he wrote.
Other emails that contain links to news stories with no comment from Brindle reveal a fixation with queer folks. He shared a story on parents griping about a Pride celebration in their kids’ middle school; a Town Hall story about a trans woman who regrets transitioning and criticized gender-affirming health care; and a Breitbart story about a Pride month social media post from the U.S. Marine Corps.
I emailed Brindle asking him if the emails betray any personal animus toward the LGBTQ community. He did not respond.
I wrote last week about my opposition to Murphy’s move to force out Brindle by hijacking control of the Election Law Enforcement Commission (a bill under consideration by the Legislature would give Murphy the sole power to remove the current commissioners and replace them all). Nothing in Brindle’s emails makes me reconsider this, since I don’t think the governor should gain this power just to target one person.
But that doesn’t mean the commissioners shouldn’t examine Brindle’s behavior at work. If he’s using his work email to trade anti-LGBTQ stories with staffers, what does that mean about how he treats his subordinates from that community? What does it say about the overall environment of his office? Is the stuff he says out loud worse than what he commits to writing, in documents he knows can be publicly revealed?
And why are Brindle and other commission employees exchanging work emails during work hours about subjects irrelevant to their jobs, like transgender swimmers who live in another state or PR gimmicks by Burger King in Austria? Could this be why the commission’s investigations move at a glacial pace?
Griffin told me when she first heard about the National Coming Out Day email, it set off “alarm bells” and made her wonder whether there was more going on, “especially since it seemed unlikely that a single email would cause Murphy to demand a resignation.”
“I also doubted that his actions were just a ‘power grab.’ I always tell my clients to ‘OPRA the emails,’ so I did. As is often the case, transparency revealed that there is indeed more to the story,” Griffin said.
Brindle’s commissioners are holding a meeting next week to discuss the matter. Garden State Equality, the state’s LGBTQ rights group, is demanding Brindle resign, saying the emails reveal Brindle’s workplace “is steeped in a toxic brine of biases which has no place in a civilized society.”
“We are disgusted by his visible contempt for the LGBTQ community. This is even more shocking as it is spewed from his official government email account, which carries with it the imprimatur of an official government position,” the group’s statement reads.
One last thing, about the National Coming Out Day email. In that one, Brindle emailed a staffer in reference to an Oct. 11, 2022, email from state government noting that day was National Coming Out Day.
“Are you coming out?” Brindle wrote to the unidentified staffer. “No Lincoln or Washington‘s Birthday’s [sic] but we can celebrate national coming out day.”
But: We do celebrate Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays — it’s called Presidents Day. And Brindle, as a state employee, had a paid day off to commemorate it. He did not get one for National Coming Out Day.
New Jersey Monitor is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Jersey Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Terrence McDonald for questions: info@newjerseymonitor.com. Follow New Jersey Monitor on Facebook and Twitter.
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Bills introduced in the Florida Republican-controlled state House and Senate inspired by Gov. Ron DeSantis calling for "media accountability" that will make it easier to sue journalists have drawn the ire of the Americans for Prosperity, the conservative political advocacy group funded by billionaire businessman Charles Koch and his late brother David, The Intercept reported.
“AFP works to make it easier for all Americans to speak up and hold political leaders accountable,” a spokesperson for Americans for Prosperity told The Intercept in regards to its lobbying against the bills. “One of the ways we do that is protect people from frivolous lawsuits targeting their speech by making it possible for judges to quickly review and dismiss bogus cases aimed at silencing opponents.”
“While our focus on this bill was on addressing the sections that would undermine those hard-won reforms, if those sections are changed, we will be neutral on the bill but not supportive of it,” the spokesperson went on. “We do not support the other aspects of the bill that are in direct opposition to the First Amendment.”
As The Intercept's Ken Klippenstein points out, the AFP's position is notable since it endorsed DeSantis during his reelection campaign last year. The group also announced that it would oppose Donald Trump's 2024 run for the White House.
IN OTHER NEWS: Trump's posts are 'the utterings of an insane person': former RNC official
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which is also funded by the Kochs, has opposed the legislation as well.
“HB 991 and SB 1220 are in direct conflict with decades of Supreme Court precedent setting a high bar on what public figures need to prove to sustain a lawsuit alleging defamation,” Joe Cohn, legislative and policy director for FIRE, told The Intercept. “The bills would make it easier for public figures to intimidate their critics by threatening costly and time consuming litigation.”
Also criticizing the legislation are various conservative media figures, such as James Schwartzel, owner of the talk radio station 92.5 FOX News, which carries conservative pundits such as Sean Hannity and others. Schwartzel reportedly called the legislation “a death knell for American traditions of free speech,” adding that it would lead to “the death of conservative talk throughout the state of Florida.”
Read the full report over at The Intercept.
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