WASHINGTON – By Election Night of 1876, Democratic presidential candidate Samuel Tilden was just one electoral vote away from victory. But returns from four states that could still hand the presidency to his Republican opponent, Rutherford B. Hayes, were in question.
Both candidates declared victory, and the dispute dragged on for months. Threats of a civil war loomed. Voter fraud and intimidation ran rampant. Congress was forced to create an electoral commission that would decide the presidency. Voting along party lines, it declared Hayes the winner by just one electoral vote.
By the time the country finally had a president, inauguration was just two days away.
“It was a violent time,” said Franita Tolson, an election law expert from the University of Southern California.
More than 140 years later, the looming chaos of the 2020 presidential race harkens back to the ugliest, most antagonistic presidential election in U.S. history.
A tsunami of litigation over election rules is already underway, and analysts expect more in November, as disputes over the legitimacy of mail-in ballots continue to rise. A global pandemic that has killed more than 220,000 people has prompted a record number of Americans to vote by mail, creating at least two nightmare scenarios: Thousands of ballots could be rejected for various technical reasons, such as allegedly mismatched signatures, and an anxious country may have to wait weeks for the election results.
Stoking the anxiety and deep political divisions is the incumbent candidate himself. Lagging behind Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, President Donald Trump has relentlessly claimed that massive voter fraud involving mail-in ballots is underway and has made clear he expects a conservative-leaning Supreme Court, with three of his appointed justices, to intervene in a disputed election.
Much of what might happen depends on how tight the race is.
“If the election is not very close, then I don’t think the election is going to get a lot of litigation,” said Rick Hansen, an election law expert from the University of California Irvine.
But if it’s close, Hansen said, expect a kind of “trench warfare” in several states.
The worst-case scenario, Tolson said, is violence in November as the country waits for days, if not weeks, for the election results. In an era polarized politics and high-stakes election, a losing party’s refusal to acquiesce, although legally meaningless, could lead to civil unrest, she said.
Already, law enforcement agencies have sounded the alarm.
Threats of anti-government sentiment, civil unrest and disinformation “will begin to converge with the presidential election in November in a manner not previously experienced by our nation,” Jared Maples, chief of New Jersey’s Homeland Security Preparedness office warned last month.
The best course for the country is to accept that election results will be delayed and to let the process play out, said Penn State Harrisburg public policy professor Daniel Mallinson.
“There’s nothing we can do about the president and his rhetoric,” he said. “We need to cultivate this norm that we very well may not know who the president is on Election Night, and that’s OK.”
2020 could be worse than 2000
The tense recount in Florida in 2000, when the Supreme Court ultimately decided the close race between President George W. Bush and Al Gore, has recently found its way back to national headlines, as pundits and political writers tried to find a modern-day comparison to the looming chaos of the 2020 presidential election.
But comparing the two is difficult, and 2020 – depending on how close the race is in critical battleground states – could be worse and will put the country’s archaic election infrastructure to the test, experts say.
“2000 is unusual because people felt like the Supreme Court decided the election. It is possible that the Supreme Court could weigh in on some of the election results in certain states that ultimately end up deciding the (2020) election. It is comparable in that sense,” Tolson said.
For the Supreme Court to be involved in deciding the next presidential election, it would have to be so close – a difference of only a few thousand ballots – in swing states, Hansen said.
“The odds of that happening … is small,” Hansen said, but added it should still be a concern.
The issues on the ground are also different.
In 2000, tensions didn’t begin until after Election Day, when it became clear that the race was too close to call in Florida, Hansen said. The 2020 presidential race is facing dueling controversies that are already underway and could stretch for days, if not weeks, after Nov. 3.
Transfer of power
The 2020 candidates are also very different from Gore and Bush.
Whether Trump will accept the result of the election if he loses is a question hanging over the ongoing controversies and looming legal disputes.
After repeatedly refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, Trump said during a townhall last week that he will accept the results if he is defeated. But the president continued to raise doubts about the election process, claiming that “thousands of ballots” have been dumped.
While there have been instances of dumping ballots, the incidents are far from the scale or the massive conspiracy the president suggests.
In early October, the Justice Department accused a New Jersey mail carrier of discarding nearly 2,000 pieces of mail, including 99 general election ballots. In September, the Justice Department announced an inquiry into nine discarded mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania.
Aside from claims of voter fraud, fears over voter suppression have centered on mailboxes.
In California, a ballot box was set ablaze this weekend, and fire officials are investigating whether the act was an attempt to disenfranchise voters. Republicans in the state had also placed unofficial ballot drop boxes at certain places, injecting further confusion into the issue. Democrats decried it as an attempt to confuse voters, and that state officials said it could be illegal.
Although Attorney General William Barr testified before the House in July that he had “no reason” to believe the election would be “rigged,” as Trump has said, Barr has more recently echoed the president’s claims that voting by mail is “very open to fraud and coercion” and likened it to “playing with fire.”
Recently, the Justice Department changed its longstanding policy aimed at discouraging election interference, with new guidance giving prosecutors more authority to take action on voter fraud allegations even as voting is underway.
Matt Lloyd, spokesman for the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, said earlier this month that the guidance was part of communication that is “routinely” sent via email to federal prosecutors during election season.
“No political appointee had any role in directing, preparing or sending this email,” Lloyd said.
Meanwhile, FBI Director Christopher Wray sought to tamp down concerns over voter fraud by telling a congressional committee last month that authorities had “not seen, historically, any kind of coordinated national voter fraud effort in a major election, whether it’s by mail or otherwise.”
Despite the president’s claims of a “rigged” election, Wray and intelligence officials reaffirmed their confidence in the U.S. election system. Officials said it would be difficult to manipulate voting results on a massive scale, although they said foreign adversaries are continuing to spread disinformation to sow chaos in the electoral process.
Hundreds of local, state and federal lawsuits are already underway in several states.
But perhaps no other state will be more closely watched than Pennsylvania, experts say. It’s a battleground state that Trump won narrowly by only 44,000 votes or 0.7% in 2016. Several polls show Biden leading in the Keystone State.
Pennsylvania has been at the center of multiple litigations, one of which reached the Supreme Court. On Monday, the high court allowed Pennsylvania to count ballots received up to three days after Election Day, a major defeat for Republicans who have sought to limit mail-in voting in the state. The ruling could have an impact in several other states, including Michigan, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Minnesota, where the deadline for mail-in ballots has been the subject of court battles.
In Pennsylvania, “there’s potential for a lot of chaos” if the race is as close as it was in 2016, said Mallinson.
“Pennsylvania is in a place where we’re still getting used to mail-in balloting in the midst of this … high-stakes election,” Mallinson said. “Like Florida in 2000, the fight will be in Pennsylvania.”
One likely source of chaos on Election Day is the state’s new and convoluted mail-in voting system that requires voters to place their ballots inside a secrecy envelope before putting them inside the return envelope may be too convoluting for many voters. In the presidential primary in June, hundreds of voters neglected to put their ballots inside the secrecy envelopes. Some counties, like Philadelphia, accepted the so-called “naked ballots,” while others rejected them.
In September, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decided that “naked ballots” will not be counted, causing an alarm among election officials over the possibility that thousands of votes will not be counted in one of the most consequential battleground states.
The decision prompted Democrats to launch digital ads educating voters on how to vote by mail in Pennsylvania.
“Will that be enough?” Mallinson said. “Anytime you have rules in place that make voting more complicated, you raise the potential of disenfranchising people. Are people in this case disenfranchising themselves?”
Lisa Deeley, chairwoman of the Philadelphia city commissioners, shared a similar sentiment in a September letter urging state lawmakers to eliminate the requirement for secrecy envelopes. With a higher-than-usual number of voters voting by mail for the first time in November, Deeley predicted that as many as 100,000 votes statewide could be rejected “all because of a minor technicality.”
“It is the naked ballot ruling that is going to cause electoral chaos,” Deeley, a Democrat, wrote.
Because of a record number of mail-in ballots, swing states such as Michigan, Iowa and New Hampshire changed state laws to allow local election workers to start pre-processing mail-in ballots – that is, opening and sorting them and verifying signatures – either the day before or a few days before Election Day. In North Carolina, Florida and Ohio, pre-processing of ballots have already started.
Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have yet to heed calls from local election workers to give them a head start. In Pennsylvania, pre-processing ballots does not start until 7 a.m. on Nov. 3, raising the likelihood of significant delays in tallying election results.
State Democrats and Republicans both agree that local election workers should be allowed to pre-process ballots early. But negotiations have remained on a standstill as party leaders sparred over how much of a head start to give election workers.
Gov. Tom Wolf and Democrats wanted as many as 21 days – now a moot point with just a little over two weeks left before the election. Republicans proposed three days, which Democrats rejected because the bill would have also banned drop boxes.
“In counties like Philadelphia, it’s going to take a lot of time just to open the ballots,” Mallinson said. “As Americans, we’ve gotten used to knowing who the winner is on Election Night. There’s a lot of pressure on Pennsylvania to have a clear count as soon as possible.”
DNI Ratcliffe, FBI Director Wray says Iran, Russia have obtained voter registration information
CNN may bill itself as a 24-hour news network but it chose not to bother with the breaking news coming from the FBI news conference regarding election interference by bad actors overseas.
While Fox News and MSNBC aired the remarks made by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and FBI Director Christopher Wray about foiled attempts by Iran and Russia to sow chaos and disinformation in the 2020 presidential election, CNN, which heavily pushed the Russian collusion narrative through much of the Trump presidency, continued with its regularly scheduled programming only to then summarize the roughly seven-minute presser in the final minutes of the ironically titled “OutFront.”
CNN has a history of skipping major news events. Last week, the anti-Trump network skipped multiple days of the Supreme Court confirmation hearing of Judge Amy Coney Barrett, prioritizing its coverage toward Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
While Fox News and MSNBC offered virtually uninterrupted coverage of the hearing, CNN also chose to ignore the explosive New York Post report on Hunter Biden’s emails.
CNN raised eyebrows in the early months of the coronavirus outbreak for beginning to skip President Trump’s remarks at the White House task force briefings.
In July, both CNN and MSNBC ignored the breaking news of the mass shooting that took place in Chicago that left at least 15 people shot outside of a funeral home.
During Wednesday evening’s news conference, Ratcliffe informed the public that Iran and Russia had taken specific actions to influence voters’ opinions. He noted that the registration information they obtained could be used to confuse voters through false communication.
The Iranian interference that’s been discovered, Ratcliffe said, has been designed to incite social unrest and damage President Trump.
“This data can be used by foreign actors to attempt to communicate false information to registered voters that they hope will cause confusion, sow chaos, and undermine your confidence in American democracy,” he said. “To that end, we have already seen Iran sending spoofed emails designed to intimidate voters, incite social unrest, and damage President Trump. You may have seen some reporting on this in the last 24 hours or you may have even been one of the recipients of those emails.”
He added that Iran was distributing a video with false information about fraudulent ballots.
“Iran is distributing other content to include a video that implies that individuals could cast fraudulent ballots, even from overseas. This video and any claims about such allegedly fraudulent ballots are not true,” he said.
“These actions are desperate attempts by desperate adversaries. Even if the adversaries pursue further attempts to intimidate or attempt to undermine voter confidence, know that our election systems are resilient and you can be confident your votes are secure. Although we have not seen the same actions from Russia, we are aware that they have obtained some voter information just as they did in 2016. Rest assured that we are prepared for the possibility of actions by those hostile to democracy.”
Wray vowed to take action in order to ensure the integrity of U.S. elections. He said Americans should be “confident” that their votes count.
“We are not going to let our guard down,” he added.
The news conference was held as Democratic voters in at least four battleground states, including Florida and Pennsylvania, have received threatening emails, falsely purporting to be from the conservative group Proud Boys, that warned “we will come after you” if the recipients didn’t vote for President Trump.
The voter-intimidation operation apparently used email addresses obtained from state voter registration lists, which include party affiliation and home addresses and can include email addresses and phone numbers. Those addresses were then used in an apparently widespread targeted spamming operation. The senders claimed they would know which candidate the recipient was voting for in the Nov. 3 election, for which early voting is ongoing.
Fox News’ Sam Dorman and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she believes she’s found President Donald Trump‘s Achilles’ heel in negotiations over a new coronavirus relief package: his desire to send out stimulus checks to people.
After months of starting and stopping talks, Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who is leading negotiations for the White House, made progress on Tuesday but had yet to reach a final agreement on another round of relief. In a hopeful step forward, they instructed committee chairs to work out the funding and language of a bill, and with just two weeks until the election, it’s still possible a deal could happen.
That countdown, Pelosi told SiriusXM’s Joe Madison Show on Wednesday, is helping Democrats hold out for the provisions they consider necessary.
“The president needs this legislation. He wants that check to go into people’s pockets. He doesn’t care about any of the rest of it in terms of what it does for working families,” Pelosi said. “So that’s our leverage, you know, that he wants that, and that’s how we’re going to try to get the rest of it.”
Democrats are looking at a $2.2 trillion price tag for their package, while the largest offer to be publicly put on the table from the White House is a $1.8 trillion plan. However, Trump has said he would go even bigger, opening the door to the possibility of a larger package. On October 6, he said that he would sign a bill for another round of stimulus checks and that they would “go out to our great people immediately.” He put the onus on Pelosi for getting a deal done during a Fox & Friends interview on Tuesday, saying his side of the aisle was ready to move forward.
“The President wants to send stimulus checks to workers because he knows they need direct relief,” Benjamin Williamson, White House senior communications adviser, told Newsweek. “It’s telling that the Speaker is openly admitting she’s holding financial support for Americans as a leverage play.”
There’s still a chance, albeit slim, that people could receive the checks before the election. In August, Mnuchin said he could start sending out payments a week after a deal is done, so technically there’s still enough time between now and the election. But with the way the legislative process works and Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett‘s upcoming confirmation vote, it would be a tall order get the payments sent out before November 3.
Pelosi told The Joe Madison Show that Democrats also want the “purchasing power” to be in Americans’ pockets. But her party can’t “abandon” the necessary funding for education, health, and state and local government aid just for a $1,200 stimulus check, “as important as that is,” she added.
Along with differences on state and local funding, how the money would be spent and the wording of a bill, Pelosi said an obstacle in relief reaching the American people could be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. He has publicly disagreed with the high price tags being floated for a relief package, but he said Tuesday that he would bring a White House–backed bill to the Senate for a floor vote.
Pelosi said it’s up to Trump to “take care of” McConnell and convince Republicans to get on board with a bill. The president’s ability to persuade McConnell will be a deciding factor in whether there will be a deal before the election, the speaker said.
At this point, the two sides have exchanged the language they want for a bill. With their positions frozen, Pelosi said, they’ll meet and determine if “this is a go or no go.”
This article has been updated with comment from the White House.
Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, shown here in 2005, allegedly ran a sex-trafficking operation together.
Patrick McMullan/Patrick McMullan via Getty Image
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Patrick McMullan/Patrick McMullan via Getty Image
Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, shown here in 2005, allegedly ran a sex-trafficking operation together.
Patrick McMullan/Patrick McMullan via Getty Image
Ghislaine Maxwell’s answers to questions about the sex-trafficking operation she allegedly ran with the late Jeffrey Epstein were made public Thursday, as a federal court released Maxwell’s 2016 deposition. The transcript is more than400 pages long, but it has been redacted to protect the privacy of some people it mentions.
The transcript is finally being unsealed after a back-and-forth legal battle between Maxwell and Virginia Giuffre, who has accused Maxwell, Epstein and others of sexually abusing her when she was a minor. Court documents allege that Maxwell procured young girls for the late Epstein to have sex with – and that the pair also ordered girls and young women to have sex with rich and powerful men.
NPR is sifting through the transcript, which you can read here:
The transcript shows that the very first question to Maxwell from Giuffre’s lead attorney, Sigrid McCawley, sought to establish her role in Epstein’s orbit.
“When did you first recruit a female to work for Mr. Epstein?” Maxwell was asked – immediately drawing an objection from her attorneys. Maxwell eventually answered the question, but she seemed to prefer to focus on semantics.
“First of all, can you please clarify the question,” she said. “I don’t understand what you mean by female, I don’t understand what you mean by recruit. Please be more clear and specific about what you are suggesting.”
After more back-and-forth, she acknowledged, “I was somebody who hired a number of people to work for Mr. Epstein and hiring is one of my functions.”
Maxwell then said the first time she hired a female to work for Epstein was “sometime in 1992” – and the woman was around age 40 or 50, she said.
U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska ordered the documents released back in July. That month, the two sides began arguing over which redactions should be made – and they were still going over revisions on Wednesday, just ahead of the deadline. Early Thursday, Preska said that after reviewing the suggested changes, she approved Giuffre’s proposed redactions and ordered “limited additional redactions.”
The public release includes other materials related to Maxwell’s deposition – but it does not include the transcript of a separate deposition by a man identified only as “John Doe #1.” The judge has given that man and another John Doe 14 days to consider making formal objections.
Maxwell, 58, was arrested in July and charged on several counts related to sex trafficking minors and perjury. She has pleaded not guilty in that case. She has previously denied the allegations against her, including under sworn testimony.
The transcript reflects hours of interviews conducted with Maxwell after Giuffre brought a 2015 defamation suit against her. Maxwell had accused Giuffre of lying when she alleged Epstein and Maxwell sexually abused and exploited her. Maxwell’s attorneys have cited her ongoing criminal case as a chief reason to suppress the transcript of her deposition.
Maxwell appealed to a higher court to try to keep the transcript secret, but earlier this week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit affirmed Preska’s ruling from July, saying the lower court was correct to reject “meritless arguments” from Maxwell.
For years, accusations against Maxwell and Epstein were obscured by legal maneuvers — most famously, a controversial nonprosecution agreement Epstein reached in 2007 with federal prosecutors in Florida. That plea deal with then-U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta led to state charges against Epstein, but it also prevented him and any co-conspirators from being prosecuted for federal sex crimes in southern Florida.
Epstein never faced a federal trial over the crimes of which he was accused. About a month after his arrest on sex-trafficking charges in 2019, he died after being found unresponsive in his jail cell in Manhattan. His death at age 66 was ruled a suicide.
Presented by The National Council on Election Integrity
With help from Myah Ward
THE LOW DOWN — This year, for the first time in 20 years, a presidential election coincides with the once-in-a-decade redistricting cycle. Across the nation, normally under-the-radar, low-budget contests for state representative and senator have been transformed into high-profile, million-dollar races.
Ten years ago, the Republicans beat Democrats badly at the redistricting game. In 2010, state representatives and senators didn’t have a say in approving President Barack Obama’s federal health law. That didn’t stop local Republicans from tying their down-ballot opponents to the Affordable Care Act. The GOP flipped nearly 20 state Houses that year, including both the state House and the Senate in half a dozen states. In Alabama Republicans took control of the Legislature for the first time since Reconstruction.
This year, Democrats are pinning their hopes of clawing back power in state capitals on the declining popularity of a new incumbent in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump.
The correlation between presidential politics and state races has become “remarkable,” said Steven Rogers, a political scientist at Saint Louis University who studied how party control relates to national election outcomes. State legislative races are “pretty much determined by the party and what people think of national government,” Rogers said.
Still, many local races are won or lost by a few hundred votes, or in the case of Virginia, a random drawing. Local Republicans are hoping the party’s anti-Trump voters still cast a ballot for their local candidates. “Republicans have been keeping everything local,” said Austin Chambers, president of the Republican State Leadership Committee. “Democrats have tried to make every one of these races about Donald Trump.”
Democrats admit now that they made a huge strategic blunder in not fighting for state legislative seats in 2010. “Look, we got our clock cleaned,” said Patrick Rodenbush, communications director at the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, formed in 2017. Those decade-old losses still have a sway over congressional and statehouse elections today, because of the maps Republicans drew in 2010.
Democrats aren’t expecting a local blue wave like the 2010 red wave. In Texas, even if Democrats are successful at winning a majority in the state House, Republicans will still control the Senate and governor’s office. But, Rodenbush said, if they can flip a few chambers like the Texas state House and divide state governments, Democrats can force compromises or get maps kicked to courts.
In Kansas and Wisconsin, Democrats aren’t trying to take control of legislative chambers. They just want to keep Republicans from maintaining or winning supermajorities so that Democratic governors can veto maps they think are unfair.
Here are some of the other battlegrounds to watch on Election Day:
Arizona: The state legislature doesn’t control redistricting — that’s done through an independent commission — but Democrats are still hoping to pick up two seats for a majority in the lower chamber and three seats for a majority in the upper chamber.
Minnesota: Republicans hold a three-seat majority in the state Senate. They are aiming to pick up nine seats to gain a majority in the state House.
North Carolina: Democrats need six seats to retake the state House, and five seats in the state Senate. They could also pick up four state Senate seats and the tie-breaking lieutenant governor office. The state’s maps have been a point of contention among Democrats for years. They point to the 2018 election as an example of partisan gerrymandering: Democrats won more total votes in state legislative races, but Republicans maintained control of both chambers.
Iowa: Republicans will retain their state Senate majority. Democrats need four seats to win a majority in the state House for the first time in a decade.
Pennsylvania: Republicans would like veto-proof majorities in both chambers to override vetoes from Democratic Gov.Tom Wolf, but they are more likely to be fending off Democrats who are trying to pick up nine Republican house seats and four in the Senate to win majorities in both chambers. Like North Carolina, this is another state where Dems won more votes overall but still didn’t control the chamber.
By historical standards, Trump’s press coverage is actually favorable. It is giving generous allowance for the possibility that things aren’t as bad as they seem for the incumbent, and that he may yet have another surprise in store for anyone who thinks that conventional dynamics of politics apply to him.
The reason is simple: Journalists and the political professionals who are their sources emerged from Trump’s 2016 upset doubting their own instincts and believing that familiar analytical prisms aren’t a reliable way to view this politician. Any previous campaign in Trump’s circumstances — bad polls nationally, behind in multiple must-win states, coming after four years of low favorability ratings and steady off-year and midterm losses for the party he leads — would be facing coverage that would be the political equivalent of a hospital vigil for a very sick patient.
Ben Ginsberg, a veteran Republican lawyer and operative, said the reluctance of many journalists to trust their instincts about the state of the race, “helps Trump because he can hold out a sliver of hope for his supporters so they don’t give up the ship. Nobody likes a loser; you’re not going to admit you’re a loser.”
Covid-2020
THE BARRETT COURT — An evenly divided Supreme Court on Monday declined to block a Pennsylvania state court ruling allowing mail-in ballots to be counted up to three days after Election Day as long as they’re postmarked by Nov. 3. The decision showed how sharply divided the Supreme Court is on election law, and how Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation could sway the outcome of future decisions.
Nightly’s Myah Ward talked with Rick Hasen, an election law expert at University of California Irvine School of Law, about how the court might rule on its nextelection lawsuit. This conversation has been edited.
What were Republicans arguing for in this case?
Number one, they argued that this would violate the rule setting a uniform federal Election Day, in effect extending the date of the election until Nov. 6. I don’t think that argument is a very serious one, because many states accept ballots that arrive after Election Day under different rules about how to treat postmarks.
The second argument is much more significant: that the Constitution gives only state legislatures the power to set the rules for conducting presidential elections. And in this case, the state Supreme Court held that the state statutes enacted by the Legislature had to give way to a constitutional right to vote protected under the Pennsylvania State Constitution.
And so here we have a clash between the state Supreme Court and the state Legislature. And this is especially important in states like Pennsylvania and North Carolina that have Democratic-dominated state Supreme Courts and Republican-dominated legislatures.
This suggests that there could be a new majority on the court that would side with the Legislature over the ability of the state Supreme Court to rely on its own Constitution in setting the parameters for voting litigation.
How could this decision potentially set the stage for post-election litigation?
One of the unfortunate things that we’ve seen in recent years is that the courts, much like the rest of America, divides along party lines on key issues. And that’s not because the judges are political hacks or are necessarily doing anything wrongful. They have different ideological views about how to decide court cases that tend to line up with views of the political parties that appointed them. So Democratic-appointed judges are much more protective of voting rights, and Republican-appointed judges are much more willing to defer to states. They might make it harder to vote in the name of preserving order or preventing fraud or something like that.
The fact that in this case, the Supreme Court divided so closely, mostly along ideological lines with Chief Justice Roberts siding with the liberals, suggested in any post-election contest if Judge Barrett is Justice Barrett by the time of Election Day, that cases that get to the Supreme Court could divide along those same types of party lines.
PENN PALS — It’s the state that sealed Trump’s victory in 2016. Now it could spell the end of his presidency. In the latest POLITICO Dispatch, Shrewsbury, Pa.’s own Holly Otterbein breaks down where things stand in the fight for Pennsylvania.
On The Hill
IT’S UNANIMOUS— Senate Democrats plan to boycott Barrett’s Judiciary Committee vote Thursday in an act of protest, according to two Democratic aides. The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote at 1 p.m. to advance Barrett’s nomination to the floor, with the full Senate set to hold a final vote on her nomination Monday, writes Marianne LeVine.
Nightly Number
PUNCHLINES
ORGANIZED ARGUING — In the latest Punchlines, Matt Wuerker interviews Rick Perlstein, the historian and author of Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976-1980, about presidential debates from the Lincoln-Douglas debates to today.
Parting Words
GAME OVER— Nightly editor — and former New York Times video game critic — Chris Suellentrop emails us:
Last night Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez cemented her status as Washington’s Most Famous Gamer.
Hundreds of thousands of people — more than 400,000 people concurrently, at one point — spent part of their Tuesday night watching “Squad” members AOC and Rep. Ilhan Omar — who tweeted a photo and details of her impressive gaming PC — play Among Us, a murder mystery game that resembles the card game Mafia. The GOTV event went down on the Amazon-owned streaming service Twitch.
But let’s focus on what’s really important here: AOC and Omar ended the comfortable six-year reign of Jared Polis, the Colorado governor and former Democratic House member, as the country’s most prominent politician-gamer.
The status handoff of Washington’s Most Famous Gamer from a libertarian-leaning white man to two millennial socialist women of color is, in some ways, the perfect summation of how video games have changed in recent years.
Video games were never really the exclusive province of white male loners, but that’s been the stereotype. And some players took that reputation seriously, so much so that they organized a backlash to try to protect it.
Six years ago, a disinformation campaign with the profoundly stupid name of “Gamergate” spent several months orchestrating a series of harassment campaigns of women game developers and critics. Several women fled their homes in fear for their safety. The harassers’ motivation: To drive people they dubbed “social justice warriors” — for their progressive values and their desire to see more realistic depictions of women and minorities in video games — out of the industry. The campaign worked well enoughthat Steve Bannon, as reported in Joshua Green’s Devil’s Bargain, used it as a template for Trump’s presidential campaign.
But Gamergate also prompted a backlash to the backlash. “It didn’t stop the thing it set out to stop,” Chris Plante, the editor-in-chief of Polygon, said to me today of Gamergate. “If anything, it made it go faster.” And so, in 2020, no one is surprised that two 30-something progressive women play video games.
Games have always been big and diverse, as disparate as TV and books and movies. They are played, and made, by people who just want to zone out with some dumb entertainment and by people who want to expand their horizons with something strange and sublime. No one person represents them. Video games don’t belong to a 31-year-old Nuyorican woman any more than they belong to reactionary Reddit trolls.
But, for one night, they did.
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WASHINGTON — The US government announced Russia and Iran have obtained some voter registration data and are aiming to interfere in the November election, according to an FBI news conference Wednesday.
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said the data can be used to spread false information to registered voters in order to cause confusion and undermine confidence in their votes.
“These actions are desperate attempts by desperate adversaries,” Ratcliffe said.
The FBI has discovered “spoofed emails” from Iran used to intimidate voters and incite social unrest. Iran has also circulated a video online that implies voters could be casting fraudulent ballots.
Officials have yet to find similar content from Russia, but Ratcliffe confirmed the country has gathered voter information similar to the 2016 election.
“We are not going to tolerate foreign interference in our elections or any criminal activity that threatens the sanctity of your vote or undermines public confidence in the outcome of the election,” FBI Director Chris Wray said.
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In the critical states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, however, the preference seemed much more clear for Biden. In Michigan, 52 percent of likely voters said they preferred Biden, to only 40 percent for Trump. Biden led by 5 percentage points in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, garnering 49 and 50 percent of respondents’ support among likely voters in each state, respectively. That compares with 44 percent of Wisconsin respondents and 45 percent of Pennsylvania respondents voicing support for Trump.
And among suburban women in all four states, Biden is at a clear advantage, leading Trump by double digits in all states. In Pennsylvania, that lead is as high as 35 percentage points. The margins of sampling error were higher for this subset of voters — plus or minus 6 to 7 percentage points. The Trump campaign has recently been making frequentdirect appealsto suburban women, who have been fleeing Trump’s base in droves in the weeks leading up to the election.
The Fox News polls were conducted Oct. 17-20 via landlines and cellphones.
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said late Wednesday that voter registration information had been obtained by Iran and Russia in an attempt to undermine confidence in the 2020 election.
Ratcliffe said Iran sought to sow unrest in the U.S. in an attempt to damage the candidacy of President Donald Trump.
He also said that Russia has obtained voter information just as the Kremlin had done in when it interfered in the 2016 election.
Ratcliffe, who appeared with FBI Director Christopher Wray, said that Iran had sent false information to voters, including spoof emails claiming that fraudulent ballots can be sent from overseas.
Ratcliffe said intelligence officials have not seen the same level of activity from Russia but said the country has also obtained voter information.
“These actions are desperate attempts by desperate adversaries,” Ratcliffe said. “We will not tolerate foreign interference in our election.”
The hastily-scheduled announcement comes after federal cybersecurity officials earlier Wednesday warned Americans that threatening emails had been sent to voters in Florida, Pennsylvania and other states that pushed Trump’s candidacy.
The emails, which purport to have been sent from “info@officialproudboys.com,” say the group has the voter’s contact information and would “come after” them if they didn’t vote for Trump.
Proud Boys is a far-right group that espouses militant authoritarian ideology.
“These emails are meant to intimidate and undermine American voters’ confidence in our elections,” said Christopher Krebs, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security.
Though the emails claim to know which candidate someone casts a ballot for, Krebs posted a message on Twitter reminding Americans that ballot secrecy is guaranteed by law in every state.
“We have already seen Iran sending spoofed emails, designed to intimated voters, incite social unrest and damage President Trump,” Ratcliffe said. “You may have seen some reporting on this in the last 24 hours or you may have been one of the recipients of these emails.”
The late-evening announcement by Ratcliffe and Wray, who did not take questions, didn’t go much further than alerts issued in August when intelligence officials warned about the activities of Russia, Iran and China.
In that bulletin, the chief of the National Counter-Intelligence and Security Center said that Russia was actively working to “denigrate” presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, while China viewed Trump as “unpredictable” and preferred that he not win re-election.
The analysis also concluded that Iran was working to foment division and undermine Trump in advance of the 2020 election.
“Tehran’s motivation to conduct such activities is, in part, driven by a perception that President Trump’s re-election would result in a continuation of U.S. pressure on Iran,” the analysis concluded, adding that Iran also feared that the Trump administration would push for regime change.
“The grave takeaway here for American voters clearly is we’re under attack, and we likely will be facing this challenge through November 3rd and beyond — so updates like these will be necessary as developments warrant,” Sen. Angus King, I-Maine said. “The American people need to be skeptical and thoughtful about information they receive, and election officials need to be doubly cautious because they are being targeted.”
Earlier Wednesday, leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee also warned voters of attempts to disrupt the U.S. election system.
“Our adversaries abroad seek to sow chaos and undermine voters’ belief in our democratic institutions, including the election systems and infrastructure that we rely on to record and properly report expressions of the voters’ will,” acting Chairman Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Vice Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., said in a joint statement without referring to specific foreign actors.
“They may seek to target those systems, or simply leave the impression that they have altered or manipulated those systems, in order to undermine their credibility and our confidence in them.”
“As we enter the last weeks before the election, we urge every American – including members of the media – to be cautious about believing or spreading unverified, sensational claims related to votes and voting. State and local election officials are in regular contact with federal law enforcement and cybersecurity professionals, and they are all working around the clock to ensure that Election 2020 is safe, secure, and free from outside interference.”
Bill Carter, a media analyst for CNN, covered the television industry for The New York Times for 25 years, and has written four books on TV, including The Late Shift and The War for Late Night. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own.
“The only people who are truly better off than they were four years ago are the billionaires who got [Trump’s] tax-cuts,” Obama said, before launching a broadside against the president over reports that Trump paid just $750 a year in personal income tax for several years running.
The former president saved his most withering attacks for Trump’s character, and for Trump’s norm-shattering leadership style.
If Biden and Harris are elected, Obama said, “We are not going to have a president that goes out of the way to insult anybody who does not support him, or threatens them with jail.”
“That is not normal presidential behavior. We would not tolerate it from a high school principal. We would not tolerate it from a coach or a coworker…why are folks making excuses for that, ‘well, that’s just him.’ No! There are consequences to these actions,” he said.
Obama appeared to be genuinely enjoying himself on stage, occasionally chuckling at his lines before shifting back into his classic campaign speech tenor.
“Our democracy is not going to work if the people meant to be our leaders lie to us every single day,” he said. “These notions of truthfulness, and democracy, and citizenship, and being responsible, these aren’t Republican or Democratic principles … They are American values, human values. And we need to reclaim them.”
Earlier in the day, before Obama’s rally, the Trump campaign released a statement slamming Obama and Biden. “Joe Biden is clearly not up to the rigors of campaigning for president, so he’s calling in Barack Obama as a reinforcement,” the campaign said.
Biden spent the day preparing for his second and final debate with Trump on Thursday night.
The second half of Obama’s remarks was dedicated to rallying Democrats to turn out and vote. “We can’t just imagine a better future. We’ve got to fight for it. We’ve got to out-hustle the other side. We have to outwork the other side. We have to vote like never before.”
The president closed his speech with a throwback to his own two historic, and successful, presidential campaigns.
“Are you fired up? Are you ready to go? Are you fired up? Are you ready to go?” The crowd cheered and hundreds of cars honked at once. “Let’s go make it happen!” he said.
Former second lady Jill Biden joins Shannon Bream on ‘Fox News @ Night.’
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has taken heat for a lack of media appearances, but his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, took a break from the campaign trail to join “The View” on Wednesday to answer multiple questions about President Trump.
“I am meeting so many people as I travel across this country and I’m hearing so many different stories and, honestly, I feel inspired by the people that I’m meeting and I know that we’re going to make such a great change, a positive change in people’s lives,” Dr. Biden said when asked if she’s exhausted from the campaign.
“I’m not tired,” she added before “The View” co-hosts took turns asking Biden questions that set her up to bash Trump.
Joy Behar then asked what Joe Biden would do to help migrant children who were separated from their parents along the southern border. Behar called it a “human rights violation” and asked if the Trump administration should be held accountable.
“We wouldn’t even be here if Joe were president, there would be no separation of families at the border,” she said. “We have to find a way to reunite these families. As a mother, this breaks my heart. I can’t even imagine it.”
Ana Navarro went next, asking Biden how her husband would have handled coronavirus differently than the way it was managed under Trump.
“We can’t do anything until we get this virus under control and you’ve heard the scientists and the doctors, that’s who we’re following and they are saying, ‘Wear your mask, socially distance,’ and we’ve got to come together. … This can’t be a political issue, this is a public health issue and if you’re not going to wear your mask for yourself, wear it for your neighbor,” she said. “Do it for someone else.”
Sunny Hostin noted that Trump supporters “are still packing into rallies” amid the coronavirus pandemic and questioned why the pandemic has become so political.
“Why do you think Trump supporters still believe him over our scientists?” Hostin asked.
Biden blamed Trump, saying his administration has made the pandemic a political issue.
“We need to listen to the doctors and the scientists, that’s what we have to do. I think it’s totally irresponsible that people are going to these rallies and they’re not wearing masks, they’re not socially distancing it’s irresponsible and people will die because of this,” Biden said.
Behar then scolded Trump for using Barron Trump’s quick recovery from coronavirus as an excuse to open schools.
“I personally am very, very skeptical of opening all of these schools. So far, it seems to have worked out a little bit because some schools have precautions,” Behar said. “But one size fits all does not work. Am I right?”
Biden reminded viewers that she is a teacher before claiming, “Nobody wants to get back to school more than the teachers do,” but dismissed the notion that America is ready to reopen all schools.
“We are listening to what the doctors and the scientists are telling us and when it’s safe to go back, we’ll go back. But right now we have to do this remote learning. I mean, parents are doing an incredible job. I know how hard it is,” she said.
Sara Haines chimed in, noting that “President Trump doesn’t remember if he took a [COVID] test the night of the first debate,” and wanted to know how the Bidens would handle it if he refused to take a test before Thursday’s scheduled debate.
“The Trump campaign has said they will adhere to the rules and take the test and we will have the result before Joe walks onto that stage,” she said.
Hostin then declared that the former vice president “showed remarkable restraint” when Trump attacked his family during the last debate.
“He continued those attacks at rallies, encouraging the crowd to lock Joe up, and on Monday he claimed that there is some sort of story on the way about a scandal involving your family,” Hostin said. “How do you feel about these constant personal attacks and how do you respond to them?”
Biden said she doesn’t like to see her family attacked but chalked it up to “distractions” and said the election “is about the American people” and they don’t want to hear “smears” against her family.
“Donald Trump just ranted, I don’t even know what he was doing up there,” she said.
Biden was then asked about Kamala Harris, her “great” relationship with Michelle Obama and if her platform would involve children and education.
Biden was not asked specifically about her stepson, Hunter Biden, who has come under fire after a series of New York Post bombshells revealed the content of his alleged laptop. When her husband, the former vice president, was asked about the Post report he snapped at the reporter who posed the question.
The White House does not speculate on personnel matters, said Judd Deere, a spokesman. “If the president doesn’t have confidence in someone, he will let you know,” Deere said.
Senate Democrats speak Oct. 12 after a confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett before the Senate Judiciary Committee. They have announced they will boycott Thursday’s scheduled committee vote on Barrett.
Stefani Reynolds/Pool via AP
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Stefani Reynolds/Pool via AP
Senate Democrats speak Oct. 12 after a confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett before the Senate Judiciary Committee. They have announced they will boycott Thursday’s scheduled committee vote on Barrett.
Stefani Reynolds/Pool via AP
Updated at 6:45 p.m. ET
Senate Democrats say they plan to boycott Thursday’s scheduled vote on the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.
“Throughout the hearings last week, committee Democrats demonstrated the damage a Justice Barrett would do – to health care, reproductive freedoms, the ability to vote, and other core rights that Americans cherish,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee said in a statement announcing their boycott. “We will not grant this process any further legitimacy by participating in a committee markup of this nomination just twelve days before the culmination of an election that is already underway.”
Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham rejected the Democratic assertion that at least two minority members were needed to proceed with the nomination.
“I will move forward,” he said Wednesday evening. “She deserves a vote.”
In a subsequent statement, Graham called the Democratic decision to boycott the vote “a choice they are making. I believe it does a disservice to Judge Barrett who deserves a vote, up or down.”
In his statement, he added: “The nomination process took a dark turn in 2013 when the Democrats changed the rules of the Senate for District and Circuit court nominees requiring a simple majority vote. My Democratic colleagues chose to engage in a partisan filibuster of Justice [Neil] Gorsuch for the first time in U.S. history requiring the changing of the rules regarding Supreme Court nominations.”
When asked about Graham’s remarks, Schumer replied: “We’re not giving the quorum they need to provide it. The rules require it.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has indicated he is planning a full Senate vote on the nomination on Monday.
The maneuver would ensure that Barrett could be sworn in before the Nov. 3 election and that she could participate in election questions that are already pending before the Supreme Court.
President Trump has said he wanted Barrett confirmed before the election so she could be there to rule on cases that might arise in the aftermath of the election. Barrett, for her part, refused at her confirmation hearings to say whether she would recuse herself in light of Trump’s statements. But it is unlikely that she would do so. Nothing in the judicial ethics rules would appear to require such a recusal unless it presents the appearance of impropriety.
Questions of recusal are ultimately decided by each justice for himself or herself, and at the Supreme Court, recusal can sometimes result in a tie vote. Should that happen, the lower court decision in the case stands.
The Democrats’ boycott comes at a time that the progressive wing of the party is leaning on the Democratic Senate leadership to do more to call attention to what is widely viewed on the Democratic side of the aisle as an “outrageous” power play to get Barrett confirmed in record time for a nominee in modern times.
Barrett’s confirmation hearings began just 16 days after her nomination. In contrast, the average time between nomination and hearings for each of the current justices on the Supreme Court was 56 days.
The result of the rushed confirmation process has been little time to explore Barrett’s record, both on and off the bench. Indeed, this week The Associated Press published a long investigative piece disclosing that “Barrett served for nearly three years on the board of private Christian schools that effectively barred admission to children of same-sex parents.” But the article was published too late for senators to ask questions of Barrett at her confirmation hearings.
As coronavirus cases rise in Wisconsin, Evers and Wisconsin Department of Health Services urged residents to stay home and slow the spread of the virus while reducing the strain on the health care system.
“We are thankful to have this facility available to Wisconsinites and our hospitals, but also saddened that this is where Wisconsin is at today,” Gov. Evers said in a statement. “Folks, please stay home. Help us protect our communities from this highly-contagious virus and avoid further strain on our hospitals.”
The Alternate Care Facility will now accept patients who meet specific clinical criteria directly from hospitals’ Emergency Departments, administer Remdesivir, and increase its oxygen treatment capability, according to the release. DHS will also be updated the number of patients at the facility each day at 2 p.m.
“Wisconsin health systems are doing all they can to provide quality care to their patients, but hospitals are facing incredible operational challenges as COVID-19 continues to surge throughout the state,” said Deb Standridge, CEO of the ACF at Wisconsin State Fair Park, in a statement. “Although it is unfortunate that Wisconsin is at this place with the virus, I am thankful that the ACF is available to provide a much needed release valve for our hospital systems who may find themselves overwhelmed with hospitalizations, as well as provide valuable care for COVID patients.”
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OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma has reached a supposedly $8 billion settlement with the federal government in which it pleads guilty in a criminal investigation over its role in the opioid epidemic, the US Department of Justice announced Wednesday.
As part of the settlement, Purdue will plead guilty to three counts related to its misleading marketing of opioid painkillers and faces a $3.5 billion criminal fine, $2 billion in criminal forfeitures, and a $2.8 billion civil settlement.
Purdue admits it illegally and misleadingly marketed its opioids, including “to more than 100 health care providers whom the company had good reason to believe were diverting opioids” for misuse; illegally paid doctors to prescribe more opioids; and took part in other fraudulent and illegal practices. Purdue says it did all of this between 2007 and at least 2017 — after a separate guilty plea in 2007 forced the company to pay more than $600 million in fines.
But no one — neither the company’s executives nor members of the Sackler family, which owns Purdue — will go to jail or prison as a result of the settlement.
Despite the settlement, it’s unclear how much Purdue will actually pay. The company is in the middle of bankruptcy proceedings, with claims from other people to whom it effectively owes money. The federal government is only one of many entities that Purdue’s holdings will likely be divvied up among.
The Justice Department also threw its support behind a deal that would turn Purdue into a public benefit company overseen by new leadership, with proceeds from OxyContin and other drugs purportedly going to help victims of the opioid crisis. Purdue previously proposed the deal to settle thousands of lawsuits against it, including from local and state governments, over its role in the opioid crisis.
Dozens of states have rejected that deal. They argue that it lets the Sacklers off the hook, since they’d remain very wealthy and out of prison, and that using revenue from OxyContin sales to fund efforts to stop the opioid crisis presents a conflict of interest.
“DOJ failed,” Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey said. “Justice in this case requires exposing the truth and holding the perpetrators accountable, not rushing a settlement to beat an election. I am not done with Purdue and the Sacklers, and I will never sell out the families who have been calling for justice for so long.”
The Justice Department said the settlement with Purdue doesn’t release anyone, including the Sackler family, from criminal liability — meaning they could be prosecuted and incarcerated in the future. A criminal investigation into the Sacklers is ongoing, according to the Associated Press.
It does, however, free Purdue and the Sacklers from the federal government’s civil claims. But states and others can continue pursuing civil litigation.
Besides Purdue, other opioid makers and distributors currently face criminal investigations and civil lawsuits. Earlier this year, the founder and former CEO of opioid maker Insys, John Kapoor, was sentenced to five and a half years in prison. Other opioid businesses, including Rochester Drug Cooperative, also face criminal charges.
Opioid companies have fueled the drug overdose crisis
Since 1999, nearly 500,000 people have died from opioid overdoses — either on painkillers themselves, or in many cases heroin or illicit fentanyl through a drug addiction that began with painkillers. Pharmaceutical companies were at the forefront of causing the crisis with aggressive marketing that pushed doctors to prescribe more painkillers. That put the drugs in the hands of not just patients but also friends and family of patients, teens who took the drugs from their parents’ medicine cabinets, and people who bought excess pills from the black market.
With OxyContin, Purdue — and the Sacklers — led the charge on this kind of marketing. They claimed that their opioid painkiller, which first hit the market in 1996, was safe and effective, both claims which are now contradicted by the real-world and scientific evidence.
Among Purdue’s alleged crimes, according to the Justice Department:
“Purdue learned that one doctor was known by patients as ‘the Candyman’ and was prescribing ‘crazy dosing of OxyContin,’ yet Purdue had sales representatives meet with the doctor more than 300 times.”
“The Named Sacklers then approved a new marketing program beginning in 2013 called ‘Evolve to Excellence,’ through which Purdue sales representatives intensified their marketing of OxyContin to extreme, high-volume prescribers who were already writing ‘25 times as many OxyContin scripts’ as their peers, causing health care providers to prescribe opioids for uses that were unsafe, ineffective, and medically unnecessary, and that often led to abuse and diversion.”
“Between June 2009 and March 2017, Purdue made payments to two doctors through Purdue’s doctor speaker program to induce those doctors to write more prescriptions of Purdue’s opioid products. Similarly, from approximately April 2016 through December 2016, Purdue made payments to Practice Fusion Inc., an electronic health records company, in exchange for referring, recommending, and arranging for the ordering of Purdue’s extended release opioid products — OxyContin, Butrans, and Hysingla.”
The Sacklers, for their part, continue to deny culpability for the opioid epidemic. The family claimed in a statement, “Members of the Sackler family who served on Purdue’s board of directors acted ethically and lawfully, and the upcoming release of company documents will prove that fact in detail. This history of Purdue will also demonstrate that all financial distributions were proper.”
Of course, many people simply don’t believe this. They point to the evidence — not just in the federal government’s case but in the lawsuits filed by dozens of states — that indicates the Sacklers were heavily involved in Purdue’s marketing for OxyContin.
Now some critics are calling not just for Purdue to face criminal culpability, but for the company’s executives and the Sacklers to as well. They argue that prison time is necessary, because fines that add up to a fraction of a company or family’s wealth aren’t enough to send a message.
“If [the Sacklers] have the perception — and it’s the correct perception — that ‘people like us just don’t go to jail, we just don’t, so the worst that’s going to happen is you take some reputational stings and you’ll have to write a check,’ that seems like a recipe for nurturing criminality,” Stanford drug policy expert Keith Humphreys previously told me.
For now, though, the Sacklers and other Purdue executives continue to escape that level of punishment.
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin worked to resolve outstanding differences over coronavirus stimulus again Wednesday as they run out of time to reach a deal before the 2020 election.
In a 48-minute phone call, the negotiators moved “closer to being able to put pen to paper to write legislation” and left “better prepared to reach compromise on several priorities,” Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill said in a tweeted statement. The pair will talk again Thursday.
“Differences continue to be narrowed on health priorities, including language providing a national strategic testing and contract tracing plan, but more work needs to be done to ensure that schools are the safest places in America for children to learn,” Hammill said.
Ahead of the conversation Wednesday, Pelosi told MSNBC that the sides “have a prospect for an agreement.” While the California Democrat said she is hopeful about a deal, she signaled Democrats and Republicans may not reach an accord until after Election Day.
“I’m optimistic that there will be a bill,” Pelosi said. “It’s a question of, is it in time to pay the November rent, which is my goal, or is it going to be shortly thereafter and retroactive?”
Vulnerable GOP senators also worry about returning home to campaign after the chamber’s expected vote to confirm Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett on Monday, according to NBC.
If Pelosi and Mnuchin reach a deal, they will have to try to win support from Senate Republicans resistant to much more federal spending on the virus response. Asked Wednesday how many GOP votes a potential deal could get, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told reporters “it would be hard to tell you” until the negotiators have actually clinched an agreement.
Of course, approving a bill in the so-called lame-duck period between the election and when winners take office in January could pose its own challenges.
As officials in Washington struggle to find common ground, millions of Americans thrown out of work by the pandemic try to scrape together enough money to eat and stay in their homes. The U.S. had an unemployment rate of about 8% in September, weeks after a $600 per week supplemental unemployment benefit, a federal moratorium on evictions and the Paycheck Protection Program small business loan initiative expired.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and many economists have warned of potentially devastating effects if Congress waits too long to send more relief.
Negotiators have in recent days said they made progress on resolving a dispute over a national Covid-19 testing strategy. But they still have not figured out how to get past two of the biggest obstacles present during months of discussions: state and local government aid and liability protections for businesses.
Pelosi has insisted on more relief for cash-crunched states and municipalities, over the objections of President Donald Trump and McConnell. Meanwhile, the White House and McConnell have insisted on including legal immunity, which Democrats have resisted.
Trump started pressuring lawmakers to reach a deal late in the game, only after he temporarily ordered his administration to stop talking to Democrats about aid.
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