Defending Democracy

Five Republicans vying to win control of Durham’s progressive school board were soundly defeated in Tuesday’s election. Four of the five finished last in their respective races. Durham’s progressive incumbents – Natalie Beyer, Matt Sears and Bettina Umstead – won three of the five seats up grabs.

State Sen. Valerie Foushee of Orange County won the Democratic primary for the open seat in the 4th Congressional District, defeating Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam and six other candidates in a contest where the millions in independent PAC spending for Foushee became a central issue in the race.

Florida authorities arrested a Black man while he was staying in a homeless shelter and charged him with voting illegally in a case tied to Republicans’ drive to root out election fraud. But Kelvin Bolton’s arrest raises questions about the rollout of Amendment 4, passed by Florida voters in 2018 to restore voting rights to Floridians with felony convictions.

Presumed Democratic nominee Cheri Beasley faces an uphill fight, but will bring plenty of experience and funding to the effort Absentee ballots are starting to roll in and in-person early voting began Thursday in this year’s U.S. Senate primary, an election in which nearly all of the focus is on the bare-knuckled fight in the Republican race. But even before that’s decided, the country’s top political prognosticators are out with predictions for the fall.

NC's Deborah Ross among 24 members of Congress speaking out Two dozen congressional Democrats are calling for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, following revelations his wife communicated with the Trump White House about overturning the election. In addition, it appears likely that the U.S. House committee probing the attack will ask Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, a Nebraska native and longtime conservative activist, to answer questions about her recently disclosed text messages as the panel’s investigation steps up.

North Carolina marked a major milestone last week. Unaffiliated voters surpassed Democrats and Republicans as North Carolina's largest group of voters. Independent now make up 34.6% (2,503,997 ) of North Carolina's registered voters. That edges out Democrats at 34.5% (2,496,434) and Republican at 30.3% (2,192,073). Libertarians (48,654) make up 0.7% of the state's voters.

Attempt at "gotcha" moment by NC's Tillis ends up backfiring U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis took part in the historic confirmation hearing of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, the  first Black woman to be nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court, with questions Wednesday suggesting that as a judge, she is not tough enough on defendants. Unlike some of his Republican colleagues, Tillis spoke in even tones, but he cut off Jackson as she tried to answer some of his questions.

It’s an overworked phrase, but for all the focus put on fundraising, polls, gaffes and dark money PACs, elections really do come down to turnout. This year, the mix of voters who show up at the polls, what motivates them to do so and, of course, the totals they post when the ballots are counted will determine the outcome of North Carolina’s U.S. Senate race and, in this era of razor thin partisan margins, perhaps control of the chamber itself.

WASHINGTON – Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday sharpened their criticisms of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, probing her work as a public defender on behalf of terrorism suspects, the judicial sentences she has handed down for child pornography offenses and her views of critical race theory.

"We will make sure not one single vote in this state is either cast or counted without Republican observers and attorneys in the room," said state Republican Party chair Michael Whatley at last week's Wake County Republican Party convention. The pledge to ramp up political scrutiny of polling sites ahead of the mid-term elections comes at a time that election officials nationwide are raising an alarm about the polarized voting environment.

HOUSTON — Damien Lewis had been detained in the Harris County Jail for a week. Other than the one hour a day he was allowed to walk around indoors and trips to court, he had been under quarantine and hadn’t left his cell. But on the day of the Texas primary earlier this month, a jail staff member escorted him down to a hallway on the jail’s first floor, which was lined with eight voting machines.

HOUSTON — Standing outside a polling location in the historically Black neighborhood of Kashmere Gardens on Election Day, lieutenant governor candidate Carla Brailey predicted that Texas’ performance in 2022’s first primary would gain national attention — no matter the outcome. Texas is already a model for other Republican-controlled states for its new law that makes it much tougher to vote for many elderly, low-income and non-white citizens, said Brailey, who went on to lose in Tuesday’s Democratic primary.

A panel of Superior Court judges on Wednesday replaced a new map for North Carolina’s congressional districts with their own, while deciding that the state House and Senate plans the legislature adopted last week meet constitutional standards set by the state Supreme Court. The trial court decision on this second set of redistricting plans may not be the last word. Republican architects of the district plans and their challengers are all appealing.

In mid-December, Texas’ highest criminal court revoked the state attorney general’s ability to use his office to prosecute election-related cases without the request of a district or county attorney. In an 8-1 opinion, the all-Republican court weakened Attorney General Ken Paxton’s power to independently go after perpetrators of voter fraud, a problem he says is rampant but is actually exceedingly rare.

“We’re a republic, not a democracy” is a thing Republicans are fond of saying. Michele Fiore, whose insatiable thirst for right-wing celebrity status has led her to run for governor of Nevada, said it during a forum with five-sixths of the rest of the GOP gubernatorial field the other day. Except Fiore, always the innovator, turned the tired phrase around to put the “we are not a democracy” part first and then firmly pronounced...

The Presidential Records Act exists for a reason. Republicans who complain about erased history should appreciate that At this point in our sick national saga, is there any law that Trump hasn’t broken? A federal statute on the books – Title 18, Section 2071 of the U.S. Code – spells out the provisions of the Presidential Records Act of 1978.