Ron DeSantis

Gov. Greg Abbott joined 21 Republican governors Monday urging President Joe Biden to scrap his student loan relief plan, asserting that the thousands of dollars in individual debt relief would harm the working class.

The governors wrote in a letter that the loan forgiveness plan offers a bailout for a minority of Americans who are largely well off, arguing that those “with the most debt, such as $50,000 or more, almost exclusively have graduate degrees, meaning hourly workers will pay off the master’s and doctorate degrees of high salaried lawyers, doctors, and professors.”

In the early stage of the then-novel COVID-pandemic, Gov. Ron DeSantis and his administration made an urgent decision at a fearful time: He ordered public schools across the state to shut down — first for an extended spring break in March 2020 and then for the rest of the school year.

But viewers watching DeSantis’ new statewide TV-and-digital campaign ad may not know that schools were initially locked down. The political ad simply showed a young school-aged kid looking into the camera to thank DeSantis.

Among Never Trump conservatives, there has been a lot of debate over whether former President Donald Trump or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis would be more dangerous to have in the White House in 2025. One school of Never Trumper thought argues that Trump would be more dangerous because he is undisciplined and lacks self-control; another Never Trumper argument, however, is that DeSantis would be more dangerous because he is a more focused and disciplined version of Trump. But one thing those Never Trumpers agree on is that the MAGA movement in general has an authoritarian mindset.

Conservative Daily Beast opinion columnist Matt Lewis, in a September 13 column, analyzes some of the MAGA Republicans who are being mentioned as possible post-Trump options for the GOP — namely, DeSantis and Blake Masters, who is running against incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly in Arizona’s 2022 U.S. Senate race. And the main thing they have in common, according to Lewis, is an affinity for “heavy-handed” authoritarianism.

One of the battles that landed Donald Trump's administration in court was over his demand that a Census question ask about the citizenship status of those living in homes around the country. The concern is that Trump would use that information to proceed with his promise to deport "probably 2 million" — and possibly 3 million — people who are in the country illegally. There was also a fear that documented immigrants would be too scared to fill out the census.

Writing in his book "Holding the Line," former US Attorney Geoffrey Berman, from the Southern District of New York, recalled the court case and the quick way in which the main Justice Department took over the investigation, replacing SDNY in the State of New York et al. vs. the United States Department of Commerce.

MIAMI — "Welcome to America's citadel of freedom: the free state of Florida, proud to be a refuge of sanity in a world gone mad," said Gov. Ron DeSantis on Sunday night, in a keynote speech to the third U.S. National Conservatism Conference. The address felt a lot like a road test for potential themes of a 2024 presidential campaign, with DeSantis largely avoiding hot-button issues that appear to be damaging Republicans at the moment — such as abortion or threats to democracy — but fulsomely praising his own heavy-handed educational "reforms" and vowing to wage war on "woke" corporations and Big Tech "censorship."

Since 2019, the National Conservatism movement and its series of conferences have served as a highbrow meetup for right-wing intellectuals, writers and think-tank staff who largely agree that the old conservative coalition that fueled "mainstream" Republican politics until the mid-2000s is now defunct and a new coalition must take its place. Many NatCon adherents belong to a "post-liberal" school of thought which holds that classical liberalism — in the Adam Smith sense of that term, with its focus on free markets and individual rights — led directly to the "neo-Marxist" progressive movements they abhor, as well as to the unchecked power of corporations to enforce economic and cultural hegemony.

A new education report released Friday by the Heritage Foundation, an influential right-wing think tank, ranks Florida as the best state in the country for "education freedom," with Arizona a close second, and Washington, D.C., New York and most of the Northeast falling to the bottom.

That claim, along with the fact that the list's top 20 states are mostly deep "red" and its bottom 10 are almost all dark "blue," might come as a surprise to education watchers who are familiar with more traditional assessments of education performance. But in the Heritage Foundation's inaugural "Education Freedom Report Card," the think tank is grading according to a different metric entirely: not things like average student funding, teacher salary or classroom size, but how easily state legislatures enable students to leave public schools; how lightly private schools and homeschooling are regulated; how active and welcome conservative parent-advocacy groups are; and how frequently or loudly those groups claim that schools are indoctrinating students.

Ex-Republican turned Democrat Charlie Crist, Florida’s Democratic 2022 gubernatorial nominee and a former Florida governor, is anxious to debate incumbent Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — and he is hoping for a debate that will be broadcast statewide. But the South Florida Sun-Sentinel’s editorial board, in a biting editorial published on September 7, lambasts DeSantis for shying away from Crist’s debate challenge.

“The tough guy in the flight helmet is afraid of Charlie Crist,” the Sun Sentinel’s editorial board argues. “‘Never, ever back down from a fight,’ Gov. Ron DeSantis insists in a campaign ad. Then, he runs away from an invitation to debate Crist on statewide television. Considering DeSantis’ obvious vulnerabilities in a format he can’t control — especially on the subjects of abortion and guns — his debate avoidance strategy may be politically savvy. But it cheats Florida voters. It shows how he loathes transparency. It’s bad for democracy.”

According to a report from Politico, one of the key groups behind Donald Trump's political ascension is hedging its bets on his future viability and getting behind some of his rivals for the 2024 Republican party presidential nomination.

The Club for Growth has had an on-again, off-again relationship with the former president and, with his legal troubles piling up, the longtime conservative powerbroker is looking elsewhere -- including Trump heir-apparent Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL).

WASHINGTON, D.C. — MSNBC's Steve Kornacki spoke about a shift he was seeing in the electorate heading into November after the Aug. 23 primary and special elections in New York, when passionately pro-choice Democrat Pat Ryan trounced his opponent. Until very recently, the only real data that could illustrate the impact of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision was a Kansas ballot measure that would amend the state’s constitution to make it easy to ban abortion outright in the state. On August 2, 2022, voters resoundingly rejected this amendment.

Weeks later, data is now starting to roll in showing two major trends for 2022 midterm elections that could prevent Republicans from getting the "red wave" they were banking on.

The Trump-appointed judge who issued the highly controversial ruling to appoint a special master to review government documents recovered by the FBI when agents executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago

"Well thanks to Donald Trump and the Republican Party adopting Trumpian attitudes, we now tonight know the name of the next Republican nominee for the United States Supreme Court," MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell said.

The last U.S. president to serve more than two terms was Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was elected to a fourth consecutive term in 1944 but died in office the following year. But thanks to the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution — which was passed by Congress in 1947, submitted to state legislatures for ratification and ratified in 1951 — all of the presidents who followed FDR could only be elected to two terms.

Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Dwight D. Eisenhower and George W. Bush served two consecutive terms, while Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush were voted out of office and went down in history as one-term presidents. In 2020, Donald Trump was voted out of office as well. But if Trump were to run for president in 2024 and win, he would become a rare example of a two-term U.S. president serving non-consecutive terms.