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  • Biden arrives in Cambodia looking to counter China’s growing influence in Southeast Asia | CNN Politics

    Biden arrives in Cambodia looking to counter China’s growing influence in Southeast Asia | CNN Politics

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    Phnom Penh, Cambodia
    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden underscored the US partnership with Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries on Saturday as “the heart of my administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy” as he seeks to counter China’s growing influence ahead of a high-stakes meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping set for Monday.

    The weekend of meetings in Cambodia comes ahead of the highly anticipated Group of 20 summit next week in Indonesia where Biden will meet with Xi for the first time in person since he took office. The ASEAN meetings – along with Sunday’s East Asia Summit, which is also being held in Phnom Penh – will be a chance for the president to speak with US allies before sitting down with Xi.

    In remarks to the summit, Biden announced “another critical step” toward building on the group’s progress as he detailed the launch of the US-ASEAN Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, which, he said, “will tackle the biggest issues of our time, from climate to health security, defend against the significant threats to rule based order and to threats to the rule of law, and to build an Indo-Pacific that’s free and open, stable and prosperous, resilient and secure.” He touted existing US financial commitments to ASEAN as he noted a budget request for $850 million in assistance for Southeast Asia.

    “This is my third trip, my third summit – second in person – and it’s testament to the importance the United States places in our relationship with ASEAN and our commitment to ASEAN’s centrality. ASEAN is the heart of my administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy. And we continue to strengthen our commitment to work in lockstep with an empowered, unified ASEAN,” Biden said in brief opening remarks as the summit began.

    The president’s first order of business in Cambodia was a bilateral meeting with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen as he looks to build on a summit between Biden and ASEAN leaders in Washington earlier this year.

    Biden, national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters aboard Air Force One, “was intent on elevating our engagement in the Indo-Pacific” from the start of his presidency, and his attendance at the ASEAN and East Asia summits this weekend will highlight his work so far, including the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework announced earlier this year and security partnership efforts.

    “He’s coming into this set of summits with that record of accomplishment and purpose behind him, and he wants to be able to use the next 36 hours to build on that foundation to take American engagement forward, and also to deliver a series of concrete, practical initiatives,” Sullivan said.

    Among those practical initiatives, Sullivan noted, are new ones on maritime cooperation, digital connectivity and economic investment. Biden is set to launch a new maritime domain effort “that focuses on using radio frequencies from commercial satellites to be able to track dark shipping, illegal and unregulated fishing, and also to improve the capacity of the countries of the region to respond to disasters and humanitarian crises,” Sullivan said.

    Biden will also highlight a “forward-deployed posture” toward regional defense, Sullivan added, to show that the US is on the front foot in terms of security cooperation.

    During his remarks, Biden also pointed to a new US-ASEAN electric vehicle infrastructure initiative.

    “We’re gonna work together to develop an integrated electric vehicle ecosystem in Southeast Asia, enabling the region to pursue clean energy, economic development, and ambitious emissions reductions targets,” he said of the initiative.

    There will also be a focus on Myanmar and discussions on coordination “to continue to impose costs and raise pressure on the junta,” which seized power from the country’s democratically elected government in a February 2021 coup.

    While in Phnom Penh, Biden will be meeting with the leaders of Japan and South Korea on Sunday following multiple weapons tests by North Korea, Sullivan said. The meeting is notable given the historic tensions between Japan and South Korea, and the relationship between the two staunch US allies has been one that Biden has attempted to bridge.

    The Japanese and the South Koreans find themselves united in concern about Kim Jong Un’s missile tests, as well as the prospect of a seventh nuclear weapons test. North Korea has ramped up its tests this year, having carried out missile tests on 32 days in 2022, according to a CNN count. That’s compared to just eight in 2021 and four in 2020, with the latest launch coming on Wednesday.

    Sullivan suggested the trilateral meeting will not lead to specific deliverables, but rather, enhanced security cooperation amid a range of threats.

    The trio of world leaders, Sullivan told reporters, will “be able to discuss broader security issues in the Indo-Pacific and also, specifically, the threats posed by North Korea’s missile and nuclear programs.”

    Sullivan said Thursday that the administration is concerned about the North Koreans conducting a seventh nuclear test but can’t say if it will come during the weekend of meetings.

    “Our concern still remains real. Whether it happens in the next week or not, I can’t say,” Sullivan said earlier this week. “We are also concerned about further potential long-range missile tests in addition to the possibility of a nuclear test. And so, we’ll be watching carefully for both of those.”

    But the Monday meeting with Xi in Bali, Indonesia, will undoubtedly hang over the summits in Cambodia, and will be part of those trilateral conversations.

    “One thing that President Biden certainly wants to do with our closest allies is preview what he intends to do, and also ask the leaders of (South Korea) and Japan, ‘what would you like me to raise? What do you want me to go in with?’” Sullivan said, adding that it “will be a topic but it will not be the main event of the trilateral.”

    Biden and Xi have spoken by phone five times since the president entered the White House. They traveled extensively together, both in China and the United States, when both were serving as their country’s vice president.

    Both enter Monday’s meeting on the back of significant political events. Biden fared better than expected in US midterm elections and Xi was elevated to an unprecedented third term by the Chinese Communist Party.

    US officials declined to speculate on how the two leaders’ political situations might affect the dynamic of their meeting.

    The high-stakes bilateral meeting between Biden and Xi will center on “sharpening” each leader’s understanding of the other’s priorities, Sullivan told reporters.

    That includes the issue of Taiwan, which Beijing claims. Biden has vowed in the past to use US military force to defend the island from invasion. The issue is among the most contentious between Biden and Xi.

    Biden will also raise the issue of North Korea, with an emphasis on the critical role China can play in managing what is an acute threat to the region, Sullivan said.

    Biden has repeatedly raised the issue in his calls with Xi up to this point, but Sullivan underscored the US view that China plays a critical role – and one that should be viewed within its own self-interest.

    “If North Korea keeps going down this road, it will simply mean further enhanced American military and security presence in the region,” Sullivan said. “And so (China) has an interest in playing a constructive role in restraining North Korea’s worst tendencies. Whether they choose to do so or not is of course up to them.”

    Sullivan said Biden will detail his position on the issue, “which is that North Korea represents a threat not just to the United States, not just to (South Korea) and Japan, but to peace and stability across the entire region.”

    Sullivan suggested the meeting will focus on a better understanding of positions on a series of critical issues, but is not likely to result in any major breakthroughs or dramatic shifts in the relationship.

    Instead, “it’s about the leaders coming to a better understanding and then tasking their teams” to continue to work through those issues, Sullivan told reporters aboard Air Force One as Biden traveled to Cambodia.

    The meeting, set to take place on the sidelines of the G-20 summit, was the result of “several weeks of intensive” discussions between the two sides, Sullivan said, and is viewed by Biden as the start of a series of engagements between the leaders and their teams.

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  • Opinion: The judge blocking student loan relief for millions is wrong about the law | CNN

    Opinion: The judge blocking student loan relief for millions is wrong about the law | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: Steve Vladeck is a CNN legal analyst and a professor at the University of Texas School of Law. He is the author of the upcoming book “The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.



    CNN
     — 

    The legal battles over President Joe Biden’s student loan debt relief program heated up on Thursday, when the Fort Worth, Texas-based Judge Mark Pittman, a Trump appointee, struck down the program and issued a nationwide injunction purporting to block it across the country.

    Biden’s program aims to provide eligible low- and middle-income borrowers $10,000 in federal student loan forgiveness – or up to $20,000 if they also received a Pell grant while in college. Before the program was put on hold, it had already received 26 million applications.

    But for Pittman, the central problem with the program is that its sheer economic size required clearer authorization from Congress than that provided by the 2003 statute on which the executive branch is relying. Invoking the Supreme Court’s new and deeply contested “major questions doctrine,” Pittman’s ruling would, if left intact, make it impossible for the program to be rescued without Congress stepping in.

    But the biggest problem with Pittman’s ruling isn’t its substance; it’s why he allowed the case to be brought in the first place. Every other challenge to the Biden program that’s been brought thus far (and there have been a bunch) have been thrown out by trial courts – the term courts use as a shorthand for whether the dispute before them is the kind of controversy over which the Constitution allows them to exercise judicial power.

    In a nutshell, a case’s standing has three elements: That the plaintiff shows an “injury in fact”; that the injury is “fairly traceable” to the defendant’s allegedly wrongful conduct; and that the courts are able to provide at least some redress for their injuries.

    Although standing is a technical doctrine, it’s also an important one. As Justice Samuel Alito wrote in a 2007 opinion, “No principle is more fundamental to the judiciary’s proper role in our system of government.”

    Basically, the idea is that it’s not the federal courts’ job to answer hypothetical questions or resolve policy disputes. Only if a party can show how they’ve been harmed by the challenged policy in a manner that is concrete and particularized – real and discrete – will they (usually) be allowed to challenge it.

    If the complaint is just that the government is acting unlawfully in a way that doesn’t affect plaintiffs personally, that’s a matter to be resolved through the political process – not a judicial one. As Justice Antonin Scalia put it 30 years ago, “vindicating the public interest (including the public interest in Government observance of the Constitution and laws) is the function of Congress and the Chief Executive.”

    That’s why, until Thursday, each court to rule on a lawsuit challenging the Biden student loan debt relief program had dismissed the suit for lack of standing, like the St. Louis-based federal district court in a suit brought by six red states. Whether the plaintiffs were taxpayers or states, the problem was the same: Like it or hate it, when the government hands out a benefit to a class of individuals, that doesn’t usually injure other individuals discretely.

    Instead, objections to the Biden program present the classic kind of “generalized grievance” that the Supreme Court has long held federal courts lack the constitutional authority to resolve – like when a taxpayer tried to sue the CIA in an attempt to force the agency to provide a public accounting of its (allegedly unlawful) expenditures.

    Against that backdrop, Judge Pittman’s holding that the two plaintiffs in his case had standing just doesn’t hold up. For both of them – Myra Brown and Alexander Taylor – Pittman tied their standing to the fact that they are partly or fully ineligible for the program. The injury they suffered, in Pittman’s view, is that they were unable to argue for more expansive eligibility criteria that would’ve included them – not that the program itself is unlawful. That reasoning, such as it is, is especially ironic for two reasons.

    First, Pittman recognized later in the same opinion that the Biden administration didn’t need to provide Brown and Taylor with an opportunity to argue for expanded eligibility criteria – because the law the program is based on is exempt from the administrative law requirement known as “notice-and-comment rulemaking.” So they had standing based on an injury Pittman held … didn’t exist.

    Second, the rest of Pittman’s analysis – that there was no means by which the Biden administration could have expanded the eligibility criteria, since the program itself is, in his view, unlawful – makes it impossible for Brown or Taylor to show how their injuries could have been redressed by the courts. Indeed, Pittman’s ruling blocking the program on a nationwide basis provides Brown and Taylor with precisely … nothing.

    The Biden administration has already announced its intent to appeal Pittman’s ruling to the ultra-conservative US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and it’s likely that whoever loses there will take the matter to the Supreme Court. So Pittman is unlikely to have the last word. But it’s still worth taking a step back and reflecting on the lengths to which Pittman went to find standing in a context in which every other court to date has held it doesn’t exist.

    Part of what Pittman might be chafing against is the idea that the federal government could take any action that might be immune to judicial review (during one hearing in the case, he compared Congress’ delegation of authority to the executive branch under the relevant statute to the infamous 1933 Enabling Act in Germany). But the federal government takes actions courts can’t review. Indeed, it’s the conservatives on the Supreme Court who have spent much of the past 40 years tightening the requirements for standing – and making it harder for plaintiffs to challenge allegedly wrongful government action. Reasonable minds can dispute – and have disputed – those precedents, but they’ve become the foundation of contemporary federal courts doctrine.

    In that respect, Pittman’s ruling, and the public discourse surrounding the student loan debt relief program more generally, is also a helpful reminder that not every policy dispute should lead to litigation – and that it’s not the job of the courts to resolve every contentious issue in American politics.

    For if Justice Alito was right that “no principle is more fundamental to the judiciary’s proper role in our system of government” than the idea that courts can only decide cases that present actual, justiciable controversies between adverse parties, then that principle ought to prevail even against the most strenuous (if not well-taken) objections to the government policy being challenged. Otherwise, the courts aren’t acting as courts; they’re just taking sides in policy debates that no one elected them to resolve.

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  • Trump sues January 6 committee seeking to block subpoena for his testimony and documents | CNN Politics

    Trump sues January 6 committee seeking to block subpoena for his testimony and documents | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Former President Donald Trump has sued the House select committee investigating January 6, 2021, as a way to challenge its subpoena for documents and his testimony, according to filings in a federal court in Florida.

    Trump is challenging both the legitimacy of the committee – which multiple courts have upheld – and is claiming he should be immune from testimony about the time he was president.

    Trump’s lawyers say they’ve communicated with the House over the past week and a half as the subpoena deadlines neared, offering to consider answering written questions while expressing “concerns and objections” about the bulk of the document requests.

    “The Subpoena’s request for testimony and documents from President Trump is an unwarranted intrusion upon the institution of the Presidency because there are other sources of the requested information, including the thousand-plus witnesses the Committee has contacted and one million documents that the Committee has collected,” his attorneys argue in the suit. “The Committee also may obtain abundant government records relevant to its inquiry. Because of this obvious availability to obtain testimony and documents from other readily available sources, the Subpoena is invalid.”

    A spokesperson for the January 6 committee declined to comment.

    Trump said the House’s demands, if he met them, would violate privilege protections around the executive branch, including revealing conversations he had with Justice Department officials and members of Congress about the 2020 election and “pending governmental business.”

    He also argued to the court that he shouldn’t have to reveal inner workings about his 2020 presidential campaign, “including his political beliefs, strategy, and fundraising. President Trump did not check his constitutional rights at the Oval Office door. Because the Committee’s Subpoena to President Trump infringes upon his First Amendment rights it is invalid.”

    Trump’s attorney, David Warrington, said in a statement in part that “long-held precedent and practice maintain that separation of powers prohibits Congress from compelling a President to testify before it.”

    The lawsuit veers the Trump subpoena fight toward a likely dead-end for the House select committee.

    Trump’s back-and-forth with the House followed by the lawsuit will make it much harder for the committee to enforce the subpoena – and the dispute essentially will be unresolvable before the current Congress expires in January.

    The lawsuit also raises some protections around the presidency that have never fully been tested by appeals courts, and Trump brought the lawsuit in a court that, unlike DC, hasn’t weighed in on his standoffs with House Democrats over the past several years.

    Trump provided to the court his team’s recent letters with the committee, which show that the House panel tried to zero in last week on obtaining records of his electronic communication on personal phones, via text or on other apps from January 6, 2021. The House also said it sought to identify every telephone and other communication device Trump used from Election Day until he left the presidency, according to the letters.

    In one letter on November 4, the original date of the document-turnover deadline, the House committee accused Trump’s team of trying to delay.

    “Given the timing and nature of your letter – without any acknowledgment that Mr. Trump will ultimately comply with the subpoena – your approach on his behalf appears to be a delay tactic,” wrote Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who chairs the committee.

    Since Trump’s team replied on November 9 that he wouldn’t testify and found no records to turn over related to personal communications, the House hasn’t respond substantively, the court papers said.

    But Trump’s legal team responded to the House this week that Trump “voluntarily directed a reasonable search for documents in his possession” that could fit those two categories. The search found nothing, his lawyers said.

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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  • Georgia runoff highlights GOP worries about Trump — and excitement surrounding DeSantis | CNN Politics

    Georgia runoff highlights GOP worries about Trump — and excitement surrounding DeSantis | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Herschel Walker’s success in his upcoming runoff against incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock could depend on GOP luminaries flocking to Georgia between now and December 6, several Republicans say.

    Many are torn over whether that should include former President Donald Trump, whose status as the anchor of the party is under renewed scrutiny amid an underwhelming midterm outcome for Republicans.

    “Since Tuesday night, the No. 1 question I’ve been getting is, ‘Is Trump going to screw this up?’” said Erick Erickson, a prominent Georgia-based conservative radio host who backed Trump’s 2020 reelection bid.

    Though the former president helped recruit Walker, a Georgia football legend and longtime Trump family friend, into the Senate contest last year, he was ultimately advised to campaign elsewhere during the general election, two people familiar with the matter told CNN. Some Republicans are still haunted by Trump’s appearances in Georgia leading up to a pair of 2021 runoffs that ended with Democrats winning both seats and gaining control of the Senate. At the time, then-President Trump littered his campaign speeches with false claims that voter fraud was rampant in Georgia and that Republican officials had worked against him.

    Walker allies feared that a Trump appearance ahead of the midterms would turn off independents and suburban women, critical voting blocs in the battleground state. Those concerns remain as Walker now enters the runoff period after neither he nor Warnock took more than 50% of the vote on Tuesday.

    Some Georgia Republicans said Trump’s decision to proceed with an anticipated 2024 campaign launch next week will distract from what should be paramount for every Republican at the moment – helping the party secure a Senate majority. Trump aides sent out invitations late Thursday for a November 15 event at Mar-a-Lago, which the former president hopes will blunt the momentum behind Ron DeSantis, the popular Florida governor and potential presidential primary rival who glided to reelection this week.

    In fact, while a debate unfolds over whether Trump should campaign for Walker in the coming days, several Republicans said they would eagerly welcome an appearance by DeSantis.

    “We need every Republican surrogate we can get into the state to put their arm around Herschel. I think that [Virginia Gov. Glenn] Youngkin or DeSantis is a better fit for soft Republicans or independents in the suburbs that we need to turn out,” said Ralph Reed, president of the Faith & Freedom Coalition.

    Reed later noted that he believes Trump could also be helpful in driving turnout among rural Georgia voters, though he cautioned that he was “not speaking for the [Walker] campaign.”

    “I’ll let them work that out,” he said.

    Walker campaign manager Scott Paradise did not return a request for comment.

    A person close to the Walker campaign said DeSantis would be “a huge draw if we could get him,” noting that the Florida governor did not campaign for Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp despite being just over the border and recently stumping for candidates in New York, Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Kemp won his own reelection bid on Tuesday, defeating Democrat Stacey Abrams for the second time. And the Georgia governor has told allies he wants to help Walker any way he can, including by hitting the campaign trail for him, according to a person briefed on those conversations.

    “DeSantis would be helpful. Youngkin would be helpful. Kemp will be helpful. I think those are the biggest draws in Georgia,” said Erickson.

    A Republican with knowledge of DeSantis’ political operation said DeSantis’ interest in campaigning for Walker “depends on what happens with the remaining two races” for Senate in Arizona and Nevada. Both contests remain too close to call but if Republicans win one of the races, control of the upper chamber will come down to Georgia.

    “It becomes the center of the political universe at that point,” this person said.

    A spokesman for DeSantis did not respond to a request for comment about his future travel plans. Though DeSantis endorsed Republicans in tough battlegrounds and campaigned for controversial candidates like Arizona’s Kari Lake and Pennsylvania’s Doug Mastriano, he made no such effort during the midterms to aid Walker amid a flurry of headlines about the former Heisman Trophy winner’s tumultuous past and personal troubles.

    DeSantis – whose Tallahassee executive residence is 20 miles from the Florida-Georgia border – also did not join the GOP fight in the Peach State two years ago for a pair of Senate runoffs Republicans ultimately lost.

    But a Republican fundraiser close to DeSantis said the Florida governor would likely make the trip across the border if he believes he can help Walker. “He’s a Republican leader and wants Republicans to take the Senate,” the fundraiser said.

    But if DeSantis shows up in Georgia, Trump allies said it would be exponentially harder to convince the former president to stay out of the state himself. Much to the frustration of those who want a distraction-free environment for Walker, Trump has continued to hurl insults at DeSantis in recent days, snapping at the Florida governor in a statement Thursday that referred to him as “an average Republican governor” who lacked “loyalty and class” for refusing to rule out a White House bid of his own.

    If the Florida Republican goes to campaign for Walker, those attacks would likely intensify, said a person close to Trump.

    “Imagine [Trump] seeing Ron campaign for Herschel while he is being told, ‘Please stay away.’ He would go ballistic,” this person said.

    One Trump aide, who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said one idea being floated is to have the former president help Walker financially with a generous check. Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC gave $16.4 million to candidates in the closing weeks of the 2022 cycle and he was sitting on more than $100 million across his fundraising committees at the end of September, according to federal election data.

    “He is looking at how he can salvage this moment and one of the ways for him to do that is to help Walker win,” said a Trump adviser, referring to Tuesday’s underwhelming outcome for Republicans and the stinging defeat of Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, whom Trump had endorsed in the Republican Senate primary.

    “But I think there’s no way he can announce a campaign for president and not go campaign for Walker,” the person added, claiming that Trump’s absence from Georgia as the presumptive frontrunner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination would suggest he is a liability for vulnerable Republicans – a toxic message to be sending at the outset of a presidential campaign.

    Michael Caputo, a 2016 Trump campaign aide who remains close to the former president, said Trump should do as much as possible to raise money for Walker because a presidential announcement will likely cause a surge in Democratic contributions to Warnock.

    “You have to offset that on the Walker side. From my perspective, the best thing Trump can do is donate and raise a ton of money for Herschel because he can,” Caputo said.

    Trump’s political team has held discussions about how he can best help Walker since it became clear the Georgia Senate race would advance to a runoff, according to two sources familiar, both of whom said nothing has been firmly decided.

    “President Trump is 220-16 in races that have been called, and with the support of President Trump, Herschel Walker, after forcing a run-off, is well-positioned to win,” Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich said in a statement to CNN.

    Much of the sensitivity around a Trump visit to Georgia stems from his campaign appearances for former GOP Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler two years ago, when both Republicans were fighting for survival in their own runoff contests.

    On the eve of those runoffs in 2021, Trump tore into statewide Republican officials for refusing to challenge the 2020 election results in Georgia, falsely claiming that he had won the state and promising to return when Kemp was up for reelection to campaign against the GOP incumbent, which Trump later fulfilled by recruiting Perdue to challenge Kemp in a primary.

    Republicans back in Washington watched the rally in horror at the time, deeply concerned that Trump’s intense focus on election fraud and various attacks on statewide Republican officials would depress voter turnout among his core supporters the following day. In the end, both Loeffler and Perdue lost their runoffs, catapulting Warnock and Jon Ossof into the Senate and handing Democrats a narrow majority.

    The episode has come back to haunt Trump as Republicans face a potentially identical scenario to 2021, with control of the Senate riding on Georgia if Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly wins reelection in Arizona and Republican Adam Laxalt unseats incumbent Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada. Laxalt currently has a razor-thin lead while Kelly is more than 100,000 votes ahead of his Republican challenger, according to the vote counts as of Friday morning. Less concerned that he would deliver a message that depresses turnout, Republicans are primarily worried this time around that Trump would ultimately be a drag on Walker in a once deep-red state that is now trending purple and where the polarizing former president might alienate the exact voters Walker needs to prevail.

    “Herschel needs to do better among Kemp voters and independents in the suburbs,” said Reed. “About 5% of the voters that went to Kemp didn’t go to Herschel and he needs to get a minimum of 1 out of every 4 of them.”

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  • Longest Serving US Senators Fast Facts | CNN Politics

    Longest Serving US Senators Fast Facts | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Here’s a look at the top 25 longest-serving senators in US history. While not in the top 25, Dianne Fienstein is the longest-serving female senator in history. She marked her 30th anniversary in the Senate in 2022.

    Names in bold are currently serving in the US Senate.

    1) Robert C. Byrd (D-WV), 51 years, 5 months, 26 days
    January 3, 1959-June 28, 2010

    2) Daniel K. Inouye (D-HI), 49 years, 11 months, 15 days
    January 3, 1963-December 17, 2012

    3) Patrick Leahy (D-VT), 47 years, 7 months, 22 days
    January 3, 1975-present

    4) Strom Thurmond (R-SC), 47 years, 5 months, 8 days
    December 14, 1954-April 4, 1956 and November 7, 1956-January 3, 2003

    5) Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA), 46 years, 9 months, 19 days
    November 7, 1962-his death on August 25, 2009

    6) Orrin Hatch (R-UT), 42 years
    January 3, 1977-January 3, 2019

    7) Carl T. Hayden (D-AZ), 41 years, 9 months, 30 days
    March 4, 1927-January 3, 1969

    8) Charles E. Grassley (R-IA), 41 years, 7 months, 22 days
    January 3, 1981-present

    9) John C. Stennis (D-MS), 41 years, 1 month, 29 days
    November 5, 1947-January 3, 1989

    10) Theodore F. Stevens (R-AK), 40 years, 10 days
    December 24, 1968-January 3, 2009

    11) Thad Cochran (R-MS), 39 years, 3 months, 6 days
    December 27, 1978-April 1, 2018

    12) Ernest F. Hollings (D-SC), 38 years, 1 month, 25 days
    November 9, 1966-January 3, 2005

    13) Richard B. Russell (D-GA), 38 years, 10 days
    January 12, 1933-January 21, 1971

    14) Russell Long (D-LA), 38 years, 3 days
    December 31, 1948-January 3, 1987

    15) Mitch McConnell (R-KY), 37 years, 7 months, 22 days
    January 3, 1985-present

    16) Francis E. Warren (R-WY), 37 years, 4 days
    November 18, 1890-March 3, 1893 and March 4, 1895-November 24, 1929

    17) James O. Eastland (D-MS), 36 years, 2 months, 24 days
    June 30, 1941-September 28, 1941 and January 3, 1943-December 27, 1978

    18) Warren Magnuson (D-WA), 36 years, 20 days
    December 14, 1944-January 3, 1981

    19) Joe Biden (D-DE), 36 years, 13 days
    January 3, 1973-January 15, 2009

    20) Pete V. Domenici (R-NM), 36 years
    January 3, 1973-January 3, 2009

    20) Carl Levin (D-MI), 36 years
    January 3, 1979-January 3, 2015

    20) Richard Lugar (R-IN), 36 years
    January 3, 1977-January 3, 2013

    20) Claiborne Pell (D-RI), 36 years
    January 3, 1961-January 3, 1997

    24) Kenneth McKellar (D-TN), 35 years, 10 months
    March 4, 1917-January 3, 1953

    25) Milton R. Young (R-ND), 35 years, 9 months, 22 days
    March 12, 1945-January 3, 1981

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  • Opinion: A really bad night for some high-profile Trump-backed candidates | CNN

    Opinion: A really bad night for some high-profile Trump-backed candidates | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    CNN Opinion contributors share their thoughts on the outcome of the 2022 midterm elections. The views expressed in this commentary are their own.

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sent a clear message to every Republican voter Tuesday night: My way is the path to a national majority, and former President Donald Trump’s way is the path to future disappointments and continued suffering.

    Four years ago, DeSantis won his first gubernatorial race by less than a percentage point. His nearly 20-point win against Democratic candidate Charlie Crist on Tuesday sent the message that DeSantis, not Trump, can win over the independent voters who decide elections.

    DeSantis’ decisive victory offers a future where the Republican Party might actually win the popular vote in a presidential contest – something that hasn’t been done since George W. Bush in 2004.

    Meanwhile, many of the candidates Trump endorsed in 2022 struggled, and it was clear from CNN exit polls that the former President – with his 37% favorability rating – would be a serious underdog in the 2024 general election should he win the Republican presidential nomination for a third time.

    My friend Patrick Ruffini of Echelon Insights tweeted a key observation: DeSantis commanded huge support among Latinos in 2022 compared to Trump in 2020.

    In 2020, Biden won the heavily Latino Miami-Dade County by seven points. DeSantis flipped the county on Tuesday and ran away with an 11-point win.

    In 2020, Biden won Osceola County by nearly 14 points. This time, DeSantis secured the county by nearly seven points, marking a whopping 21-point swing.

    DeSantis combined his strength among Latinos with his support among working class Whites, suburban white-collar voters and rural Floridians. That’s a coalition that could win nationally, unlike Trump’s limited appeal among several traditional Republican voting segments.

    Last year, it was Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin of Virginia who scored an earthquake in a Biden state by keeping Trump at arm’s length and focusing on the issues. Tonight, it was DeSantis who ran as his own man (Trump rallied for Marco Rubio but not DeSantis at the end of the campaign) and showed what you can do when you combine the political instincts required to be a successful Republican these days with actual governing competence.

    DeSantis made a convincing case that he, rather than Trump, gives Republicans the best chance to defeat Biden (or some other Democrat) in 2024. With Trump plotting a reelection campaign announcement soon, DeSantis has a lot to think about and a solid springboard from which to launch a challenge to the former President.

    Scott Jennings, a CNN contributor and Republican campaign adviser, is a former special assistant to President George W. Bush and a former campaign adviser to Sen. Mitch McConnell. He is a partner at RunSwitch Public Relations in Louisville, Kentucky. Follow him on Twitter @ScottJenningsKY.

    Roxanne Jones

    Let it go. If election night confirmed anything for me it is this: We can all – voters, doomscrollers, pundits and election deniers included – stop believing every election revolves around former President Donald Trump. Instead, when asked in exit polls across the country, younger people, women and other voters in key demographics said their top concerns were inflation, abortion rights, crime and other quality of life issues.

    What a relief. It finally feels like a majority of voters want to re-center American politics away from the toxic, conspiracy theory-driven rhetoric we’ve experienced over the past several years.

    Yes, Republicans are still projected to take control of the House of Representatives, with a narrow (and narrowing) majority – but will that make much difference? Despite the advantage Democrats had in the chamber the past two years, President Joe Biden has still had to battle and compromise to get parts of his agenda passed. How the balance of power will settle in the Senate is unclear, with a few races in key states still undecided as of this afternoon. It will likely hinge, again, on Georgia, and a forthcoming runoff election between the incumbent, Democrat Raphael Warnock, and his GOP challenger, former football star Herschel Walker.

    No matter what party you claim, there were positive signs coming out of the midterms. My hometown, Philadelphia, and its surrounding suburbs, came up big in another election – rejecting the Trump-backed New Jersey transplant, Dr. Mehmet Oz, and helping to send Democratic candidate John Fetterman to the US Senate. Pennsylvania voters also rejected an election denier, Doug Mastriano, in the race for state governor, and made history by electing Democrat Summer Lee as the state’s first Black woman to serve in Congress.

    Maryland voters, meanwhile, elected Democrat Wes Moore as their state’s first Black governor. And in New England, Maura Healey became Massachusetts’ first female governor. She’s also the first out lesbian to win a state governorship anywhere in the US.

    Democracy, freedom and equality also won out on ballot issues.

    In unfinished business, voters tackled slavery, permanently abolishing “involuntary servitude” in four states – Vermont, Oregon, Alabama and Tennessee. (Louisiana held on to the slavery clause under its constitution, however.)

    Despite efforts to limit voting rights across the nation, voters in Alabama approved a measure requiring that any change to state election law goes into effect at least six months before a general election. And, in Kentucky, voters narrowly beat back an amendment that would have removed constitutional protections for abortion rights – one of several instances in which voters refused to accept restrictive reproductive rights measures.

    Still, the highlight of my midterms night was watching 25-year-old Maxwell Frost win a US congressional race in Florida – holding a Democratic seat in a state whose 2022 results skewed red, no less. More and more, we are seeing young people energized, voting and stepping up with fresh ideas to lead this democracy. I’m here for it.

    Roxanne Jones, a founding editor of ESPN The Magazine and former vice president at ESPN, has been a producer, reporter and editor at the New York Daily News and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Jones is co-author of “Say it Loud: An Illustrated History of the Black Athlete.” She talks politics, sports and culture weekly on Philadelphia’s 900AM WURD.

    Michael D'Antonio

    Voters made Tuesday a bad night for former President Donald Trump. Despite his efforts, many of his favorites not only lost but denied the GOP the usual out-party wave of wins that come in midterm elections. This leaves a diminished Trump with the challenge of deciding what to do next.

    In the short term, the man who so often returns to his well-worn playbook resumed his years-long effort to ruin Americans’ confidence in any election his team loses. “Protest, protest, protest,” he told his followers, even before all the polls closed. In a sign of his declining power, no mass protests ensued.

    Nevertheless, false claims of election fraud will likely be a major theme if he follows through on his loudly voiced hints that he plans to run for the White House again in 2024.

    To run or not to run is now the main question. It’s not an easy choice. Trump could end up like other one-term presidents he has mocked, George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, who retreated from politics and devoted themselves to new interests. However, he has other options. He could revive his television career – Fox News? – or return to his businesses. Or, he could develop a new role as leader of an organization that can exploit his prodigious fundraising ability, and give him a platform for grabbing attention, while leaving him plenty of time for golf.

    Running could forestall the various legal problems he faces, but he has lawyers who might accomplish the same goal. Fox News is unlikely to pay enough, and his businesses are now being watched by a court-appointed overseer. This leaves him with a combination of easy work – fundraising and pontificating – combined with his favorite pastimes: fame, money and fun. What’s not to like?

    Michael D’Antonio is the author of the book “Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success” and co-author, with Peter Eisner, of the book “High Crimes: The Corruption, Impunity, and Impeachment of Donald Trump.”

    Jill Filipovic

    Democrat Kathy Hochul won the New York State gubernatorial race, and thank goodness. Her opponent, Lee Zeldin, is not your typical moderate Republican who usually stands a chance in a blue state. Instead, he’s an abortion opponent who wanted voters to simply trust he wouldn’t mess with New York’s abortion laws.

    Zeldin was endorsed by the National Rifle Association when he was in Congress. He is a Trump acolyte who voted against certifying the 2020 election in Congress, after texting with former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and reportedly planning to contest the outcome of the 2020 election before the results were even in.

    New Yorkers sent a definitive message: Our values matter, even in moments of profound uncertainty.

    Plus, Hochul made history as the first woman elected to the governor’s office in New York.

    This race was, in its final days, predicted to be closer than it actually was. Part of that was simply the usual electoral math: The minority party typically has an advantage in the midterms, and Republicans are a minority in Washington, DC, with a Democrat in the White House and a Democratic majority in Congress. And polling in New York state didn’t look as good for Hochul as it should have in a solidly blue state: Voters who talked to pollsters emphasized crime fears and the economy; abortion rights were galvanizing, but didn’t seem as definitive in an election for a governor vastly unlikely to have an abortion criminalization bill delivered to her desk.

    The polls were imperfect. It turns out that New Yorkers are, in fact, New Yorkers: Not cowed by overblown claims of crime (while I think crime is indeed a problem Democrats should address, New York City remains one of the safest places in the country); determined to defend the racial, ethnic and sexual diversity that makes our state great; and committed to standing up against the tyranny of an anti-democratic party that would force women into pregnancy and childbirth.

    However, Democrats shouldn’t take this win for granted. The issues voters raised – inflation, crime – are real concerns. And the reasons many voters turned out – abortion rights, democratic norms – remain under threat.

    Hochul’s job now is to address voter concerns, while standing up for New York values: Openness, decency, freedom for all. Because that’s what New Yorkers did today: The majority of us didn’t cast our ballots from a place of fear and reaction, but from the last dregs of hope and optimism. We voted for what we want. And we now want our governor to deliver.

    Jill Filipovic is a journalist based in New York and author of the book “OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind.” Follow her on Twitter.

    Douglas Heye

    North Carolina’s Senate race received less attention than contests in some other states – possibly a result of the campaign having lesser-known candidates than states like Georgia, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

    In the waning weeks of the race, multiple polls had the candidates – Democratic former state Supreme Court chief justice Cheri Beasley and Republican US House Rep. Ted Budd – separated by a percentage point or less.

    Perhaps more than in any other Senate campaign, the issue of crime loomed large in North Carolina, with Budd claiming in his speeches that it had become much more dangerous to walk the streets in the state. That talking point, along with his focus on inflation, appeared to help propel him to victory in Tuesday’s vote.

    Beasley, by contrast, focused much of her attention on abortion, making it a central plank of her campaign that she would stand up not just for women’s reproductive rights, but workplace protections and equal pay.

    The two candidates were vying for the seat being vacated by retiring Republican Sen. Richard Burr. Despite being seen as a red state – albeit that is less solidly Republican than neighboring southern states – North Carolina has elected Democrats as five of the last six governors and two of the last six senators.

    Former President Barack Obama won the state in 2008 but lost it in 2012 by one of the closest margins in the nation. And while Donald Trump won the state in 2016 and 2020, he never received 50% of the vote.

    Douglas Heye is the ex-deputy chief of staff to former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, a GOP strategist and a CNN political commentator. Follow him on Twitter @dougheye.

    Sophia A. Nelson

    Many of us suspected that Democratic Florida Congresswoman and former House impeachment manager Val Demings would have an uphill battle unseating incumbent Sen. Marco Rubio, and weren’t entirely surprised when she lost the race. With 98% of the vote counted, Rubio won easily, garnering 57.8% of the vote to Demings’ 41.1%.

    As it turns out, Tuesday was a tough night all around for Black women running statewide. Beyond Demings’ loss, Judge Cheri Beasley narrowly lost her Senate bid in North Carolina.

    And in the big heartbreak of the night, Stacey Abrams lost the Georgia governor’s race to Gov. Brian Kemp – a repeat of her defeat to him four years ago, when the two tangled for what at the time was an open seat.

    Abrams shook up the 2018 race by expanding the electoral map, enlisting more women and people of color who turned out in record numbers – but she fell short of punching her ticket to Georgia’s governor’s mansion. And on Tuesday she lost to Kemp by a much wider margin than in 2018.

    Had Abrams succeeded, she would have been the first Black woman to become the governor of a US state. After her second straight electoral loss, America is still waiting for that breakthrough.

    Meanwhile, an ever bigger winner of the night was Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis, who handily defeated Democrat Charlie Crist.

    DeSantis’ big night solidifies what some feel is a compelling claim to front-runner status for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, on what turned out to be a strong election night for Republicans in the state.

    It’s hard for a Democrat to win statewide in the deep South. And as Demings, Beasley and Abrams have shown, it’s particularly tough for a Black woman to win statewide in the region: In fact, it’s never been done.

    All three women were well-qualified and well-funded stars in their party. But, when we look at the final vote tallies, it tells a familiar story. Take Demings, for example, a former law enforcement officer – she was Orlando’s police chief – and yet, she did not get the big law enforcement endorsements. Rubio did, although he never wore the blue.

    That was a big red flag for me, and it showed how much gender and race still play in the minds of male voters and power brokers of my generation and older. For Black women, a double burden of both race and gender at play. It is the nagging story of our lives.

    As for Abrams, I think Kemp was helped by backing away from Trump and modulating his campaign message to appeal to suburban women and independents.

    Abrams, meanwhile, just didn’t have the same support and enthusiasm this time around for her candidacy. And that is unfortunate, but for her to lose by such a big margin says much more.

    At the end of the day however, these three women have nothing to regret. They ran great campaigns, and they created great future platforms for themselves. And they each put one more crack in the glass ceiling facing candidates for the US Senate and governors’ mansions.

    Sophia A. Nelson is a journalist and author of the new book “Be the One You Need: 21 Life Lessons I Learned Taking Care of Everyone but Me.”

    David Thornburgh

    Reflections on the morning after Election Day can be a little fuzzy: Chalk it up to a late night, incomplete data and a still-forming narrative. Still, as a longtime Pennsylvania election-watcher, I see three clear takeaways:

    1) Pennsylvanians don’t take to extreme anti-establishment candidates. The GOP candidate for governor, Doug Mastriano, broke the mold of just about any statewide candidate in the last few decades.

    The state that delivered wins to center-right and center-left candidates like my father Gov, Dick Thornburgh, Sen. Bob Casey and Gov, Tom Ridge gave establishment Democrat Josh Shapiro a wipeout double-digit victory.

    2) “You’re not from here and I am” and “Stick it to the man” proved to be sufficiently powerful messages for alt-Democrat John Fetterman to win his Senate race, albeit by a much smaller margin.

    Amplified by more than $300 million in campaign spending (making PA’s the most expensive Senate race in the country), those two simple themes spoke to the quirky, stubborn authenticity that is a longstanding strand of Pennsylvania’s political DNA.

    3) In the home of Independence Hall, independent voters made a significant difference. Pretty much every poll since the beginning of both marquee races showed the two party candidates with locked in lopsided mirror-image margins among members of their own party.

    Over 90% of Democrats said they’d vote for Shapiro or Fetterman and close to 90% of Republicans said the same of Mastriano or Oz. The 20 to 30% of PA voters who consider themselves independent voters may have been more decisive than most tea-leaves readers gave them credit for.

    Most polls showed Shapiro and Fetterman with whopping leads among independent voters. They may not have been the same independent voters: Shapiro’s indy supporters could be former GOP voters disaffected by Trump, and Fetterman’s indy squad could be young voters mobilized by the abortion rights issue (about half of young voters are independents nationally).

    The growing significance of this independent vote in close elections may increase pressure on both parties to repeal closed primaries so that indy voters can vote in those elections. Both parties will want to have more time and opportunity to court them in the future.

    With Florida ripening to a deeper and deeper Red, Pennsylvania may loom larger and larger as the most contested, consequential swing state in the country: well-worth watching as we move inexorably to 2024.

    David Thornburgh is a longtime Pennsylvania civic leader. The former CEO of the Committee of Seventy, he now chairs the group’s Ballot PA initiative to repeal closed primaries. He is the second son of former GOP Governor and US Attorney General Dick Thornburgh.

    Isabelle Schindler

    The line of students registering to vote on Election Day stretched across the University of Michigan campus, with students waiting for over four hours. There was a palpable sense of excitement and urgency around the election on campus. For many young people, especially young women, there was one motivating issue that drove their participation: abortion rights.

    One of the most important and contentious issues on the ballot in Michigan was Proposal 3 (commonly known as Prop 3), which codifies the right to abortion and other reproductive freedoms, such as birth control, into the Michigan state constitution. Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, many Michiganders have feared the return of a 1931 law that bans abortion, even in cases of rape and incest, and contains felony criminal penalties for abortion providers.

    Though the courts have prevented that old law from taking effect, voters were eager to enshrine reproductive rights in the state constitution, and overwhelmingly voted in favor of Prop 3 with over 55% of voters approving the proposal. This is a major feat given the coordinated campaign against the proposal. Both pro-life groups and the Catholic Church strongly opposed it, and many ads claimed it was “too confusing and too extreme.”

    The issue of abortion was a major focal point of the gubernatorial campaign between Gov, Gretchen Whitmer and her Republican challenger, Tudor Dixon. Pro-Whitmer groups consistently highlighted Dixon’s support of a near-total abortion ban and her past comments that having a rapist’s baby could help a victim heal. Whitmer’s resounding win in the purple state of Michigan is certainly due, in part, to backlash against Dixon’s extreme positions on the issue.

    After the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, so many young voters felt helpless and despondent about the future of abortion rights. However, instead of throwing in the towel, Michigan voters showed up and displayed their support for Whitmer and Prop 3, showing that Michiganders support bodily autonomy and the right to choose.

    Isabelle Schindler is a senior at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy. She is a field director for College Democrats on her campus and has worked as a UMICH Votes Fellow to promote voting.

    Paul Sracic

    From the beginning, the US Senate race in Ohio wasn’t expected to be close. In the end, it wasn’t – with author and political newcomer J.D. Vance defeating Rep. Tim Ryan by over six percentage points.

    Republicans also swept every statewide office in Ohio, including the elections for justices on the Ohio Supreme Court who, for the first time, had their political party listed next to their names on the ballot. This will give the Republicans a dependable majority on state’s highest court, which is significant since there is an ongoing unresolved legal battle over the drawing of state and federal legislative districts.

    It is now safe to say that Ohio, for so long the quintessential swing state, is a Republican state. What happened is simple to explain: White, working-class voters have become a solid part of the Republican coalition in the Buckeye State. In 2016, then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump convinced these voters that the Democratic Party had abandoned them to progressive and internationalist interests with values they did not share. This shift was symbolized by the movement of voters in the former manufacturing hub of Northeast Ohio, once the most Democratic part of the state, to the GOP.

    The question going into 2022 was whether the Republicans could keep these voters if Trump was not on the ballot. The Democrats recruited Rep. Tim Ryan to run for the Senate because he was from Northeast Ohio, having grown up just north of Youngstown. They hoped that he could win those working-class voters back, and Ryan designed his campaign around working-class economic interests, distancing himself from Washington, DC, Democrats and even opposing President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program. Once the votes were counted, however, Ryan performed only slightly better than Biden had in Northeast Ohio. In fact, he even lost Trumbull County, the place where he grew up and whose voters he represented in Washington for two decades.

    Ohio Democrats will face another test in two years, when the Democratic Senate seat held by Sherrod Brown will be on the ballot. Brown won in 2018, but given last night’s result, the Republicans will have no problem recruiting a quality candidate to run for a seat that, right now, at least leans Republican.

    Paul Sracic is a professor of politics and international relations at Youngstown State University and the coauthor of “Ohio Politics and Government” (Congressional Quarterly Press, 2015). Follow him on Twitter at @pasracic.

    Joyce M. Davis

    Pennsylvanians clearly rejected the worst of right-wing extremism on Nov. 8, sending a strong message to former President Donald Trump that his endorsement doesn’t guarantee victory in the Keystone State.

    Trump proved to be a two-time loser in the commonwealth this election cycle, despite stirring up his base with screaming rallies for Republican candidates Dr. Mehmet Oz, Doug Mastriano and Rep. Scott Perry.

    And a lot of people are breathing a long, hard sign of relief.

    Mastriano, who CNN projects will lose the race for the state’s governor to Democrat Josh Shapiro, scared many Pennsylvanians with his brash, take-no-prisoners Trump swagger. He inflamed racial tensions, embraced Christian nationalism, and once said women who violated his proposed abortion ban should be charged with murder. On top of all that, he’s an unapologetic election denier.

    Dr. Oz, meanwhile, couldn’t shake his carpetbagger baggage, and Oprah’s rejection – on November 4, she endorsed his rival and now-victorious candidate in the Senate race, John Fetterman – seems to have carried more weight than Trump’s rallies, at least in the feedback I’ve received from readers and community members.

    All of this should compel some serious soul-searching among Republican leadership in Pennsylvania. What could have they been thinking to place all their marbles on someone so outside of the mainstream as Mastriano? Did they think Pennsylvanians wouldn’t check Oz’s address? Will they rethink their hardline stance on abortion?

    In a widely-watched House race, Harrisburg City Councilwoman Shamaine Daniels made a valiant Democratic effort to unseat GOP Rep. Scott Perry, after the party’s preferred candidate pulled out of the race. But her lack of name recognition and inexperience on the state or national stage impacted her ability to establish a base of her own. So the five-term incumbent, who played a role in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, will return to Washington – though perhaps with a clipped wing.

    Many Pennsylvanians may be staunch conservatives, but we proved we’re not extremists – and we won’t embrace Trump or his candidates if they threaten the very foundations of democracy.

    Joyce M. Davis is outreach and opinion editor for PennLive and The Patriot-News. She is a veteran journalist and author who has lived and worked around the globe, including for National Public Radio, Knight Ridder Newspapers in Washington, DC, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague.

    Edward Lindsey

    In the last two years, President Joe Biden, Sen. Jon Ossoff and Sen. Raphael Warnock, all Democrats, won in the Peach State. There has been a raging debate in Georgia political circles since then as to whether these races signal a long-term left turn toward the Democratic Party, caused by shifting demographics, or whether they were merely a negative reaction to former President Donald Trump. Tuesday’s results point strongly to the latter.

    Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who had rebuffed Trump’s demand to overturn the 2020 presidential result, cruised to a convincing reelection on Tuesday with a pro-growth message by defeating the Democrats’ rising star Stacey Abrams by some 300,000 votes. His coattails also propelled other Republican state candidates to victory – including the Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger who had also defied the former President – and helped to keep the Georgia General Assembly firmly in GOP hands.

    However, before sliding Georgia from a purple political state back into the solid red state column, we still have one more contest to look forward to: a runoff for the US Senate, echoing what happened in Georgia’s last set of Senate races.

    Georgia requires candidates to win over 50% of the vote and the presence of a Libertarian on the ticket has thrown the heated race between Warnock, the incumbent senator and senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and Georgia football great Herschel Walker into an overtime runoff campaign to be decided on December 6.

    Both Walker and Warnock survived November 8 to fight another day despite different strong headwinds facing each of them. For Warnock, it has been Biden’s low favorability rating – hovering around 40% nationwide, and only 38% in Georgia, according to Marist. For Walker, it has been the steady drumbeat of personal allegations rolled out over the past few months, some admitted to and others staunchly denied.

    Warnock has faced his challenge by emphasizing his willingness to work across the aisle on some issues and occasionally disagreeing with the President on others. Walker, who is backed by Trump, has pulled from the deep well of admiration many Georgians feel for the former college football star.

    Both of these strategies were strong enough to get them into a runoff, but which strategy will work in that arena? The answer could be crucial to determining which party controls the US Senate, depending on the result of other races that have yet to be called. Stay tuned while Georgians enjoy having the two candidates for Thanksgiving dinner and into the holiday season.

    Edward Lindsey is a former Republican member of the Georgia House of Representatives and its majority whip. He is a lawyer in Atlanta focusing on public policy and political law.

    Brianna N. Mack

    In his bid to win a seat in the US Senate, Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan tried to appeal to working class voters who felt abandoned by establishment Democrats. Those blue collar voters – many of them formerly members of his party – overwhelmingly supported Trump in 2016 and again in 2020.

    Unfortunately for Ryan, his strategy failed. He lost to J.D. Vance by a decisive margin, according to election projections.

    It was, perhaps, a predictable ending for a candidate who threw away the traditional approach of rallying your base and instead courted the almost non-existent, moderate Trump voter. And it’s a shame. Had Ryan won, Ohio would have had two Democratic senators. The last time that happened was almost 30 years ago, when Howard Metzenbaum and John Glenn represented our state.

    But in wooing Republicans and right-leaning moderates, Ryan abandoned many of Ohio’s left-leaning Democrats who brought him to the dance.

    That approach was perhaps most evident in his ads. In a campaign spot in which he is shown tossing a football at various computer screens showing messages he disapproves of, he hurls the ball at one emblazoned with the words “Defund the Police” and dismisses what he disdainfully calls “the culture wars.”

    Another ad showed Ryan, gun in hand, hitting his mark at target practice, as the words “Not too bad for a Democrat” appear on the screen. To imply you’re pro-gun rights when majority of Americans support gun control legislation – and when your party explicitly embraces a pro-gun control stance is bewildering. Ryan’s ads on the economy began to parrot the anti-China rhetoric taken up by Republicans. And when President Joe Biden announced his student debt plan in an effort to invigorate the Democratic bringing economic relief to millions of millennial voters, Ryan opposed the move.

    As a Black woman living in a metropolitan area, I would have liked to see him reach out to communities of color, perhaps by making an appearance with African American members of Ohio’s congressional delegation Rep. Joyce Beatty or Rep. Shontel Brown. But I would have settled for one ad addressing the economic or social concerns of people who don’t live in the Rust Belt.

    Ryan might have won if he’d gotten the kind of robust backing from his own party that Vance got from his – and if he’d courted his Democratic base.

    Brianna N. Mack is an assistant professor of politics and government at Ohio Wesleyan University whose coursework is centered on American political behavior. Her research interests are the political behavior of racial and ethnic minorities. She tweets at @Mack_Musings.

    James Wigderson

    Wisconsin remains as split as ever with Democratic Gov. Tony Evers surviving a challenge from businessman Tim Michels and Republican Sen. Ron Johnson barely holding off a challenge from Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes.

    In late February, Johnson, who Democrats hoped might be a beatable incumbent, was viewed favorably by only 33% of Wisconsin’s voters, according to the Marquette University Law School poll. He was viewed unfavorably by 45% of the electorate with 21% saying they didn’t know what to think of him or hadn’t heard enough about him. He finished the election cycle still seen unfavorably by 46% with 43% of the voters holding a favorable view of him.

    However, Democrats decided to run possibly the worst candidate if they wanted to win against Johnson. At one point in August, the relatively unknown Barnes actually led Johnson by 7%. But familiarity with Barnes didn’t help him. Crime was the third most concerning issue for Wisconsin voters this election cycle, according to the Marquette University Law School poll, and Johnson’s campaign successfully attacked Barnes for statements in support of decreasing or redirecting police funding and for reducing the prison population. In the end, Johnson came out victorious.

    So, with Republicans winning in the Senate, what saved Evers in the gubernatorial race? Perhaps it was women voters.

    The overturning of Roe v. Wade meant Wisconsin’s abortion ban from 1849 went back into effect. Michels supported the no-exceptions law but then flip-flopped and said he could support exceptions for rape and incest. Johnson, for his part, successfully deflected the issue by saying he wanted Wisconsin’s abortion law to go to referendum.

    Another issue that may have soured women voters on Michels was the allegation of a culture of sexual harassment within his company. Evers’ campaign unsurprisingly jumped at the opportunity to argue that “the culture comes from the top.” (In response to the allegations against his company, Michel said: “These unproven allegations do not reflect the training and culture at Michels Corporation. Harassment in the workplace should not be condoned, nor tolerated, nor was it under Michels Corporation leadership.”) Michels’ divisive primary fight against former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch also didn’t help his appeal to women voters, especially in Kleefisch’s home county of Waukesha, formerly a key to a Republican victory in Wisconsin.

    If Republicans are going to win in 2024, they need to figure out how to attract the support of suburban women.

    James Wigderson is the former editor of RightWisconsin.com, a conservative-leaning news website, and the author of a twice-weekly newsletter, “Life, Under Construction.”

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  • John Fetterman will defeat Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania Senate race, CNN projects | CNN Politics

    John Fetterman will defeat Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania Senate race, CNN projects | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Democrat John Fetterman will win the Pennsylvania Senate race, CNN projects, defeating Republican Mehmet Oz, flipping the seat and boosting Democratic hopes of keeping their majority.

    Fetterman, the state’s lieutenant governor since 2019, and Oz, who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump, ran one of the most contentious and expensive Senate contests in the country – all of it while Fetterman continued his recovery from a pre-primary stroke that often limited his ability to speak on the trail.

    For Democrats trying to preserve their control of what has been a Senate split 50-50, with Vice President Kamala Harris as the tie-breaking vote, Fetterman’s win could prove decisive.

    Republican Sen. Pat Toomey’s retirement in a state President Joe Biden won two years ago created Democrats’ best opportunity to pick up a seat and save their narrow majority, and the Commonwealth entered Election Day as one of at least nine states holding what were expected to be competitive Senate races.

    Fetterman’s victory caps a remarkable ascent from his time as mayor of Braddock, a borough in western Pennsylvania, to the lieutenant governor’s office – which he won after unseating a fellow Democrat in a 2018 primary – to the US Senate. A longtime progressive, he is an outspoken supporter of abolishing the filibuster, raising the minimum wage, legalizing marijuana, criminal justice reform and passing legislation to protect same-sex marriage, among other leading liberal priorities.

    His success will also provide inspiration to stroke survivors and other disabled Americans, some of whom took heart from his efforts to carry on campaigning even as he exhibited the lingering effects of his May stroke. Fetterman, though he has not released his full medical records, has said he expects to be at or near full strength by the time he takes office early next year.

    Though Oz himself largely steered clear of disparaging Fetterman over his stroke-related difficulties, his campaign was less cautious, leading the Republican to repeatedly distance himself from his own staffers’ remarks. Asked at one point late in the campaign whether he would speak to his own patients the way his campaign addressed Fetterman, Oz responded with one word: “No.”

    The White House didn’t weigh in on individual races over the course of election night. But following Fetterman’s projected win, it sent a subtle, if pointed message: “The president had a great time with the senator-elect on Saturday,” a White House official told CNN.

    While many Democrats in battleground seats sought to avoid Biden’s presence on the campaign trail, Fetterman embraced the president. Biden made several trips to Pennsylvania and each time in the closing months of the race, Fetterman would appear alongside of him, including in Philadelphia this past weekend.

    Biden’s Pennsylvania roots are an integral part of his story, his win in 2020 is central to the presidency, and now, after 20 visits to the state in his first two years in office, it marks the first Democratic pickup in the critical battle for the Senate majority.

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

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  • Photos: 2022 US midterm elections | CNN Politics

    Photos: 2022 US midterm elections | CNN Politics

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    A worker uses a steamer to get the wrinkles out of an American flag before the start of at an election night watch party in Los Angeles on Tuesday, November 8.

    Jae C. Hong/AP

    Updated 7:49 PM EST, Tue November 8, 2022

    The midterm elections on Tuesday will decide which party controls the chambers of Congress for the next two years.

    Democrats are playing defense in blue-state strongholds such as New York, Washington and Oregon as they aim to hold on to the House of Representatives. Republicans only need a net gain of five seats to win back control of the House.

    A handful of swing state showdowns will decide the destiny of the Senate, which is currently split 50-50. Some of the key Senate races to watch are in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and Pennsylvania.

    A Republican triumph in either the House or the Senate has the potential to curtail Joe Biden’s presidency and set up an acrimonious two years of political standoffs ahead of the 2024 race for the White House.

    Dozens of governorships, secretaries of states and attorneys general are also on the ballot.

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  • Democrats confront their nightmare scenario on election eve as economic concerns overshadow abortion and democracy worries | CNN Politics

    Democrats confront their nightmare scenario on election eve as economic concerns overshadow abortion and democracy worries | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Democrats close their midterm election campaign Monday facing the nightmare scenario they always feared – with Republicans staging a gleeful referendum on Joe Biden’s struggling presidency and failure to tame inflation.

    Hopes that Democrats could use the Supreme Court’s overturning of the right to an abortion and a flurry of legislative wins to stave off the classic midterm election rout of a party in power are now a memory. Biden faces a dark political environment because of the 40-year-high in the cost of living – and his hopes of a swift rebound next year are clouded by growing fears of a recession.

    On the eve of the election, Democrats risk losing control of the House of Representatives and Republicans are increasingly hopeful of a Senate majority that would leave Biden under siege as he begins his reelection bid and with ex-President Donald Trump apparently set to announce his own campaign for a White House return within days.

    It’s too early for postmortems. Forty million Americans have already voted. And the uncertainty baked into modern polling means no one can be sure a red wave is coming. Democrats could still cling onto the Senate even if the House falls.

    But the way each side is talking on election eve, and the swathe of blue territory – from New York to Washington state – that Democrats are defending offer a clear picture of GOP momentum.

    A nation split down the middle politically, which is united only by a sense of dissatisfaction with its trajectory, is getting into a habit of repeatedly using elections to punish the party with the most power.

    That means Democrats are most exposed this time.

    If the president’s party takes a drubbing, there will be much Democratic finger-pointing over Biden’s messaging strategy on inflation – a pernicious force that has punched holes in millions of family budgets.

    Just as in last year’s losing off-year gubernatorial race in Virginia, which the president won by 10 points in 2020, Democrats are closing the campaign warning about democracy and Trump’s influence while Republicans believe they are addressing the issue voters care about most.

    “Here’s where the Democrats are: they’re inflation deniers, they are crime deniers, they’re education deniers,” Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.

    Hilary Rosen, a longtime Democratic consultant, said on the same show that her party had misjudged the mood of the electorate.

    “I’m a loyal Democrat, but I am not happy. I just think that we are – we did not listen to voters in this election. And I think we’re going to have a bad night,” Rosen told CNN’s Dana Bash.

    “And this conversation is not going to have much impact on Tuesday, but I hope it has an impact going forward, because when voters tell you over and over and over again that they care mostly about the economy, listen to them. Stop talking about democracy being at stake.”

    Rosen is not the only key figure on the left uneasy with the midterm strategy. Former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont, urged the White House to do more to stress economic concerns in recent weeks even while acknowledging the crisis of democracy and the importance of abortion rights. In retrospect, it appears Democrats were slow to recognize that a favorable period over the summer, spurred by falling gasoline prices and a hot streak for the president in passing legislation, wouldn’t last long enough to compensate for a ruinous political environment caused by the economy.

    In effect, Biden’s stress on the threat to US political institutions posed by Trump essentially asks voters to prioritize the historic foundation of America’s political system over their own more immediate economic fears.

    It’s a message that resonates strongly in Washington, DC, where the scars of the US Capitol insurrection are keenly felt. And it is undeniably important because the survival of the world’s most important democracy is at stake. After all, Trump incited an insurrection that tried to thwart the unbroken tradition of peaceful transfers of power between presidents.

    But outside the Beltway bubble of politicians and journalists, democracy feels like a far more distant, esoteric concept than the daily struggle to feed a family and to be able to afford to commute to work. From Pennsylvania to Arizona, the return to normality after the Covid-19 nightmare that Biden promised remains elusive to many as the economic after effects of the once-in-a century health emergency linger.

    The impossibility of the political environment for Democrats was laid bare in a CNN/SSRS poll released last week. Some 51% of likely voters said the economy was the key issue in determining their vote. Only 15% named abortion – a finding that explains how the election battleground has tilted toward the GOP. Among voters for whom the economy is their top concern, 71% plan to vote Republican in their House district. And 75% of voters think the economy is already in a recession, meaning that Biden’s efforts to stress undeniably strong economic areas – including the strikingly low unemployment rate – are likely to fall on deaf ears.

    It’s too simple to say that Biden has ignored the impact of inflation, or doesn’t understand the pain it’s bringing to the country.

    The premise of his domestic presidency and his entire political career has been based on restoring the balance of the economy and restoring a measure of security to working and middle class Americans. His legislative successes could bring down the cost of health care for seniors and create a diversified green economy that shields Americans from future high energy prices amid global turmoil. But the benefits from such measures will take years to arrive. And millions of voters are hurting now and haven’t heard a viable plan from the president to quickly ease prices in the short-term.

    There is no guarantee that plans by Republicans to extend Trump-era tax cuts and mandate new energy drilling would have much impact on the inflation crisis either. And divided government would likely mean a stalemate between two dueling economic visions. But the election has turned into a vehicle for voters to stress their frustration, with no imminent hope that things will get better soon.

    Biden has resorted to highlighting bright spots of the economy – claiming to have reignited manufacturing, high job creation and a robust effort to compete with China. He’s now warning that Republicans would gut Social Security and Medicare on which many Americans rely in retirement.

    And in practice, there is not much a president can do to quickly lower inflation on their own. The Federal Reserve is in the lead and the central bank’s strategy of rising interest rates could trigger a recession that could further haunt Biden’s presidency.

    Inflation and high gas prices are also a global issue and have been worsened by factors beyond Biden’s control, including the war in Ukraine and supply chain issues brought on by the pandemic. At the same time, however, economists are debating the wisdom of Biden’s high-spending bills that sent billions of dollars into an overheating economy. And the White House’s repeated downplaying of the soaring cost of living as “transitory” badly misjudged the situation and was another thing that battered Biden’s credibility – on top of the confidence some voters lost in him during the US withdrawal from Afghanistan last year.

    The Republican Party also got exactly what it wanted as Trump has delayed his expected campaign announcement until after the midterms, depriving Biden of the opportunity to shape this election as a direct clash with an insurrectionist predecessor whom he beat in 2020 and who remains broadly unpopular. Such a confrontation might have enabled the president to dampen the impact of his own low approval ratings and win over voters who still disdain the twice-impeached former president.

    Ironically, Biden’s struggles in framing a believable economic message could bring about the very crisis of democracy that he is warning about.

    Any incoming GOP majority would be dominated by pro-Trump radicals. Prospective committee chairs have already signaled they will do their best to deflect from Trump’s culpability on the January 6, 2021, insurrection and go after the Justice Department as it presses on with several criminal investigations into the ex-President’s conduct. And Tuesday’s election could usher in scores of election deniers in state offices who could end up controlling the 2024 presidential election in some key battlegrounds. GOP dominance of state legislatures could further curtail voting rights.

    High inflation has also always been a toxic force that brews political extremism and tempts some voters to be drawn to demagogues and radicals whose political creed is based on stoking resentment and stigmatizing outsiders.

    If Democrats do lose big on Tuesday night, Trump will be a beneficiary.

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  • Why 2022 may bring a new peak of political instability | CNN Politics

    Why 2022 may bring a new peak of political instability | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    All year, the principal question looming over the 2022 campaign has been whether Democrats could defy political gravity.

    As we’re nearing the end, the answer appears to be: no, or at least not entirely.

    Midterm elections have almost always been bad for the party holding the White House, and they have been especially bad when most Americans are dissatisfied with the economy and the president’s performance. Those conditions are present in force now, with polls showing that most Americans disapprove of how President Joe Biden has handled crime, the border, and especially the economy and inflation. Pessimism about the economy is pervasive. Historically such attitudes have generated big gains up and down the ballot for the party out of the White House – in this case, the Republicans.

    That may be how the election ultimately turns out, especially in House and state legislative races where the individual candidates are less well-known, and many voters are likely to express dissatisfaction with the country’s direction by voting against the party in power. The president’s party, in fact, has lost House seats in all but three midterm elections since the Civil War. If there is a surprise in the House, it’s less likely to come from Democrats maintaining their majority than the Republicans exceeding the average 26 seat midterm gain for the party out of power since World War II.

    But Democrats have remained unexpectedly competitive in the higher-profile Senate and gubernatorial races by focusing attention not only on what Biden has done, but what Republicans might do, with power. Many of these statewide contests have become a “double negative election”: while most voters in the key states consistently say they disapprove of Biden’s job performance, most also say they hold negative personal views about the GOP candidates, many of whom were propelled to their nomination by support from Donald Trump. If Democrats hold the Senate, or hold their own in the top governor races, a principal reason will be the large number of voters who viewed GOP nominees as unqualified, extreme (particularly in their desire to ban or restrict abortion), a threat to democracy, or all of the above. The same dynamic could also save some House Democrats in districts where Biden has fallen well below majority support.

    So many races are so close – within the margin of error in public polls – that the results Tuesday could range from a true red wave to a Democratic sigh of relief. The scary precedent for Democrats is that in wave years almost all of the close races often tip in the same direction – toward the party out of power. A reason for Democratic hope is that in the final surveys, their candidates are consistently running better among all registered voters than among those the pollsters consider most “likely” to vote. That means the party could outperform expectations if even slightly more of its key constituencies (particularly young people) show up than pollsters anticipate – an outcome that groups such as the powerful union Unite Here is trying to achieve with 1,000 canvassers knocking on doors each day in Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania. “We are in the battle every place,” says Gwen Mills, the union’s secretary-treasurer. “All of [these races] are within the margin of effort.”

    If Republicans take back either chamber this week, it would mark the fifth consecutive election in which a president who went into a midterm with unified control of government had it revoked by the voters. That happened to Donald Trump in 2018, Barack Obama in 2010, George W. Bush in 2006 and Bill Clinton in 1994.

    No president, in fact, has successfully defended unified control of Congress through a mid-term since Jimmy Carter in 1978 – and he was insulated by the huge Congressional margins Democrats had amassed after Watergate, as well as his party’s strength in what was then still a “solid South” for Democrats. (The sole asterisk on this pattern is that Republicans under George W. Bush regained unified control of Congress in the 2002 midterm held a year after the September 11 attacks after a party switch by a Republican senator in early 2001 flipped control of the chamber to Democrats and broke the GOP’s unified hold on Congress.) A Republican takeover of either or both chambers would extend one of the defining trends of modern politics: Neither party has held the White House and Congress for more than four consecutive years since 1968. That’s a stark departure from most of the 20th century when each side, at different times, cemented lasting control for as long as 14 consecutive years.

    No matter what happens Tuesday, most experts don’t anticipate either party shattering this fragile modern stand-off to establish a lasting edge. “I don’t see either side getting a durable advantage,” says Gary Jacobson, a professor of political science emeritus at the University of California at San Diego. “They are highly polarized parties, and they are very closely balanced overall.”

    From that angle, Republican gains Tuesday would simply continue a long-standing tendency toward instability in our political system, with the initiative rapidly shifting back and forth between the parties. But the election could also ratchet that instability to a combustible new level. The strong tide behind Republicans virtually guarantees victories for some, maybe many, of the hundreds of candidates who have embraced Trump’s lies about the 2020 elections and signaled that they will seek to tilt the electoral rules toward the GOP or simply deny future wins by Democrats. Some of those candidates, if they lose this week, seem likely to emulate Trump after 2020 and refuse to concede, claiming fraud. (Arizona GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake and Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin have each suggested as much already.) The most important legacy of this week’s voting may be the beachhead inside the electoral system it will likely establish for Republican officeholders untethered to America’s democratic traditions as we have known them.

    In more conventional political calculations, Tuesday’s results seem likely to resurface debates, that had somewhat receded during the Trump years, over the structural electoral challenges Democrats face in the battle to control Congress.

    The modern period of Congressional elections arguably began in 1994, when Republicans captured both the House and Senate in the backlash against Bill Clinton’s chaotic first two years. That ended an era in which Democrats had held the House majority for 40 consecutive years, and controlled the Senate, usually by wide margins, for all but six years over that long span.

    Since 1994, though, Republicans have controlled Congress more often than Democrats. The GOP has held the Senate for about 16 and a half years (counting the roughly half year before the party switch cost them their majority in 2001) and Democrats for only about 11 and a half years. The imbalance in the House has been even more lopsided: Republicans have held it for 20 of these past 28 years, and Democrats for just eight. Especially ominous for Democrats is that if they lose the House on Tuesday, it would mark the second consecutive time they have surrendered their majority only four years after regaining it. (The previous case came when they were swept from the majority by the Tea Party uprising in 2010, just four years after they recaptured the chamber in 2006.) By contrast, Republicans held the House for 12 consecutive years from 1994 through 2006, and then for eight from 2010 through 2018.

    What makes this disparity especially striking is that it has come even as Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections since 1992 – something no party has done since the formation of the two-party system in 1828. (No Republican candidate has reached even 51% of the presidential popular vote since 1988.) These results clearly suggest the modern Democratic electoral coalition, on a nationwide basis, is larger than the Republican coalition. And yet, Republicans, more often than not, have controlled the Congressional majorities in this era anyway.

    Aggressive GOP gerrymanders partly explain that difference in the House. But that doesn’t fully explain the GOP’s House advantage and it isn’t a factor at all in the party’s Senate edge. Instead, the Republican Congressional success largely reflects geographic and demographic limitations of the Democratic coalition that almost certainly will be evident again this week.

    Tuesday’s election is likely to remind Democrats again that they are competing in too few places to establish a durable majority in Congress. In the House, Republicans have established such an overwhelming hold on rural and exurban districts that Democrats must win a very high share of urban and suburban districts to reach a majority. In a good year, like 2018, Democrats can meet that test. And even now, the continued resistance of college-educated suburban voters to the Trump-era Republican Party has provided Democrats a chance to hold down their losses in white-collar districts. But ceding so many rural, exurban and small-town seats leaves Democrats too little cushion to lose some of their suburban seats – as they inevitably will when discontent over the economy, and secondarily crime, is this high even in those places.

    If anything, the Democrats’ geographic challenge is even greater in the Senate. A dominant trend in modern US politics is that both parties are winning virtually all the Senate seats in states that typically support their presidential candidates. The challenge for Democrats is that, despite their repeated victories in the popular vote, slightly more states reliably lean Republican than Democrat in presidential races. Democrats already hold 39 of the 40 Senate seats in the 20 states that voted against Donald Trump both times (Susan Collins in Maine is the only exception). But 25 states voted for Trump both times, and they provide Republicans an even larger Senate contingent, with the GOP holding 47 of their 50 seats. Democrats have squeezed out their precarious 50-50 Senate majority only by capturing eight of the ten seats in the five states that flipped from Trump in 2016 to Biden in 2020 (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia).

    This geography is what makes this week’s Senate elections so crucial to Democrats. This year’s key races are occurring almost entirely in states that Biden won, albeit mostly narrowly, with Democrats defending seats in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, Colorado and Washington, and targeting Republican-held seats in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. (With longer odds, Democrats have also mounted serious challenges to Republicans in Ohio and North Carolina, two states that twice voted for Trump.) Given that map, Democratic strategists recognize it’s critical for the party to expand, or at least maintain, its Senate margin now.

    After this year, the Senate terrain will rapidly become more foreboding for Democrats. In 2024, they will be defending all three of the seats they hold in the two-time Trump states (Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Joe Manchin in West Virginia and Jon Tester in Montana), as well as seats in half a dozen other swing states that could go either way in a presidential contest (including Arizona, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.) If most of the toss up Senate races fall to the Republicans on Tuesday, those gains, combined with the 2024 map, could put the GOP in position to dominate the upper chamber throughout this decade. “If Republicans take the Senate, I don’t see in our immediate lifetime how Democrats are going to take back” the majority, says Doug Sosnik, a senior White House political adviser to Bill Clinton.

    Much of the Democrats’ Senate problem is rooted in the constitutional provision that provides two Senate seats to every state. That magnifies the influence of sparsely populated, rural and strongly Republican interior states. There’s no political repositioning that is likely to provide Democrats a realistic chance any time soon to win Senate seats in Wyoming and Idaho or North and South Dakota.

    But many Democratic strategists argue that the party must expand its map in the Senate by finding ways to attract more non-college and non-urban voters, especially with white people, but across racial lines, in at least a few more states. That list of potential targets includes places like Ohio, Iowa and Florida where Democrats competed much more effectively as recently as under President Barack Obama. Rebuilding the party’s competitiveness in those states could take years and likely require a significant change in its positioning and message.

    Jim Kessler, executive vice president for policy at the centrist Democratic group Third Way, points out that while the party’s modern coalition of young people, racial minorities and college-educated whites has allowed it to effectively contest the presidency, it doesn’t represent a winning majority in enough states to reliably hold the Senate. “When you look at the electoral college, college educated [and diverse] America is close to enough to elect you president,” Kessler says. “But it is not close to getting you a majority in the Senate.”

    Tuesday’s election could also demonstrate the reemergence of a second demographic challenge for Democrats in the battle for Congress, what analysts in the past have called the “boom and bust” nature of their electoral coalition. The biggest remaining uncertainty for Tuesday’s election may be how many young people, who polls show continue to back Democrats in large proportions, turn out. Usually, turnout falls more for young people than for older generations between presidential and midterm elections (hence the “boom and bust” risk). But in 2018, robust youth turnout helped power the Democratic gains.

    Large-scale polls focused particularly on young adults (such as the Harvard Institute of Politics survey) have found them expressing levels of interest comparable to 2018. Yet their participation in early voting has been lackluster, and several recent national surveys (such as CNN’s poll last week) found their engagement lagging. If turnout among young adults disappoints on Tuesday, it will strengthen those Democrats who argue the party must prioritize regaining ground among middle-income, middle-aged voters, especially those without college degrees. (That includes non-college Latinos, particularly men, who may continue to drift away from Democrats at least somewhat this week.) The sharpest post-election debates among Democrats are likely to revolve around whether the party must embrace more conservative approaches on crime and immigration, two issues Republicans wielded to powerful effect, in order to earn a second look from more non-college educated voters across racial lines.

    History says that a bad result on Tuesday need not panic Democrats about 2024 (though, in practice, it probably will). Midterms have not had much value forecasting the result of the presidential election two years later. Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush had relatively good first-term midterms and then lost their reelection races. The president (or his party) did lose the White House two years after bad midterms in 1958, 1966, 1974 and 2018. But Harry Truman in 1948, Ronald Reagan in 1984, Bill Clinton in 1996 and Barack Obama in 2012 all won reelection, usually convincingly, two years after stinging midterm losses. Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist who has built models that project presidential outcomes based on economic and public opinion data, says the results of the midterm add literally no predictive value to the forecasts.

    The 2024 presidential election will begin almost immediately after Tuesday – probably before all the last votes are counted. Though midterm gains are the rule for the party out of power, Trump is likely to interpret GOP victories as a clarion call for his return; aides say he could announce a 2024 candidacy as soon as this month. White House officials believe Biden is certain to run if Trump does because he views the former president as an existential threat to American democracy. On Election Day 2024, the combined age of these two men will be nearly 160 years. Polls show that one of the few areas of broad public agreement is that most Americans do not want either to run again.

    Yet, long before any newly elected officials take office, or any gavels in Congress change hands, the first consequence of Tuesday’s bitterly fought election may be to place America more firmly on the path toward exactly such a rematch. And this time, such a confrontation could occur with the electoral machinery in decisive states under control of Trump allies who share his willingness to tilt or even subvert the system. Whatever storms rattle the political system this week, the real tempest won’t arrive until 2024 – and it may bring the greatest strain on the nation’s fundamental cohesion since the Civil War.

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  • Oath Keepers leader testifies 2020 election was ‘unconstitutional,’ paints himself as anti-violence | CNN Politics

    Oath Keepers leader testifies 2020 election was ‘unconstitutional,’ paints himself as anti-violence | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the right-wing Oath Keepers who prosecutors say called for a “bloody revolution” to keep then-President Donald Trump in power, painted himself as an anti-racist Libertarian who believed the 2020 election was unconstitutional as he testified in his own defense on Friday.

    Rhodes is the first of the five defendants charged with seditious conspiracy in federal court in Washington, DC, to testify.

    The courtroom was packed during his testimony, and Rhodes choked up several times discussing his family, suicide rates among veterans and other subjects highlighted by his lawyer, Phillip Linder. He spoke directly to the jury and appeared very comfortable on the stand.

    Rhodes explained to the jury that he didn’t believe either Trump or Joe Biden won in 2020 because the election itself was “unconstitutional.”

    “I believe the election was unconstitutional, and that made it invalid,” Rhodes testified. “You really can’t have a winner of an unconstitutional election.”

    Rhodes told the jury that, as he saw it, election laws in several states were changed by “executive fiat” and not through the state legislature.

    “In multiple states especially in the swing states … you had them putting in new rules in direct violation” of state laws, Rhodes said.

    “Everyone kept focusing on the computers” and other theories of voter fraud, Rhodes said, instead of the constitutional issues, which they needed to discuss before figuring out “whether there’s fraud on the ground.”

    Rhodes did not detail any specific laws that were changed. CNN has found no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

    Prosecutors have alleged that Rhodes wanted Trump to remain in power and that the militia leader supported a “bloody revolution” to secure the presidency.

    Rhodes told the jury Friday how he was honorably discharged from the military and went on to study law at Yale, focusing his attention on the Bill of Rights – which Rhodes called “the crown jewel of our Constitution” – and protecting civilian rights in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks.

    Rhodes, a self-described Libertarian, testified that he founded the Oath Keepers in 2009 to “reach, change and inspire” people about what rights the Constitution afforded them.

    Pushing back on what he saw as narratives that the Oath Keepers were racist or white nationalists, Rhodes said the organization traveled to various cities for racial justice protests, claiming the group protected “minority business owners” in Ferguson, Missouri.

    “Frankly we kind of embarrassed the police, Rhodes testified, “because we showed them how to do it right, protecting the business owners while still respecting the rights of the protesters.”

    Oath Keepers rules, Rhodes claimed, specifically bar any member who “advocates for the overthrow of the United States.”

    During the first several weeks of the seditious conspiracy trial against the far-right organization, prosecutors presented evidence that the Oath Keepers stockpiled weapons at a hotel in Virginia on January 6 as part of a so-called quick reaction force. Prosecutors alleged that the five defendants intended to use those weapons in case called upon by Trump to stop the transfer of power to Biden.

    Rhodes told the jury that wasn’t the case and claimed that the QRF’s were set up at an event the Oath Keepers attended to “respond in case there is an emergency,” including if his men were ever injured.

    The Oath Keepers also used QRFs every time they provided security, Rhodes said, including several events in Washington, DC. After the election, Rhodes testified he was concerned Antifa would “attack the White House,” and claimed the leftist organization was threatening to “drag Trump out” if the president refused to concede.

    In November, “I was concerned that this might actually happen,” Rhodes told the jury, citing his rhetoric on a recorded meeting prosecutors showed the jury in which Rhodes allegedly said that “there’s going to be a fight.”

    If Antifa did try to attack the White House, Rhodes said that “President Trump could use the Insurrection Act, declare this an insurrection, and use myself and other veterans to protect the White House.”

    No such attack at the White House occurred.

    Rhodes is expected to continue his testimony on Monday.

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  • Obama and Trump bring dueling visions for America in return to campaign trail | CNN Politics

    Obama and Trump bring dueling visions for America in return to campaign trail | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Midterm elections are almost always about incumbent presidents, especially when they are unpopular. But in a unique twist this year, two ex-presidents who lost control of the House while in office have turned into their parties’ closing messengers.

    Barack Obama and Donald Trump personify two rival visions of the meaning of America itself and are extending their bitter years-long duel as they find themselves on opposite sides of a profound confrontation over the future of US democracy.

    Obama remains an avatar of progressive change and an increasingly diverse nation, who’s far more popular than current Democratic President Joe Biden. He’s the most sought-after political fireman for Democrats struggling to survive tight swing state races and is being used to energize young, minority and suburban middle-class voters.

    Trump has mobilized his Make America Great Again movement, which first emerged as a backlash to the first Black presidency and is built around the notion that the cultural values of a largely White, working-class nation is under siege from political correctness, undocumented migration, experts and the establishment.

    Obama is lambasting politicians, celebrities and sports stars who peddle conspiracy theories, fear and social media “garbage” of which Trump is the most prominent exponent. And he’s delivering searing take-downs of the 45th president’s proteges who are running for election on the platform of his 2020 election falsehoods – like Arizona GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake.

    “Why would you vote for somebody who you know is not telling the truth about something? I mean, on something that important, I don’t care how nicely they say it. I don’t care how poised they are or how well-lit they are,” Obama said of the former local TV news anchor, who has emerged as a rising MAGA star, in Arizona on Wednesday.

    “What happens when truth doesn’t matter anymore?” Obama added. “If you just repeat something over and over again, and it’s a lie, and yet because your side is saying it, it’s okay.”

    Trump adopted exactly that tactic in his return to the campaign trail in Iowa on Thursday night, in what was ostensibly an appearance for veteran GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley, but felt like a first-in-the-nation caucus warmup for 2024.

    He falsely claimed that he had won in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in 2020, two of the states that helped Biden win the White House.

    “Your favorite president got screwed,” Trump told his crowd on a frigid night in Sioux City, in which he repeated false conspiracies that Obama spied on his campaign in 2016.

    One interesting comparison of the styles of Trump and Obama on show in their rival rallies is in their use of humor. Trump has long used comedy – often dark and cruel – to bind himself to his audience, a feature that doesn’t always come across on TV. Often his crowds look like they are having a whale of a time, enthralled by a rule-breaking bull in a china shop trashing decorum with every word and lacerating his opponents with outrageous accusations and belittling nicknames.

    On Thursday, Trump had his crowd in stitches in a digression from an otherwise dystopian speech as a stiff wind blew around the teleprompters showing his prepared remarks.

    “I’ve got these teleprompters waving like a flag,” he said. “I’m going to get sea sick!”

    Obama’s humor is typically warmer, although no less cutting, but he uses it effectively to ridicule Republicans before delivering a devastating political hit. For instance, in Wisconsin last weekend, he branded Republicans as the party of the rich when he accused Sen. Ron Johnson of voting for a tax break for private plane owners.

    “He fought for this. And then, his adult children bought not one, not two, but three private planes because apparently, carpooling was not an option. Now, I mean, you need three?” Obama joked.

    People in Obama’s extended circle have remarked that their former boss has been on fire this campaign season. Lacking the burdens of presidential office, unlike his former vice president, Obama has shown the kind of freedom and relish for big political rallies that rocketed him to the Democratic nomination in 2008.

    It’s easy to tell when the 44th president doesn’t have his heart in his task. In the early rallies of his 2012 election race, for instance, he was lethargic and weary, and he didn’t approach top form in his events last year in an off-year election in Virginia.

    But his rallies this year have rocked with the pulsating energy and enthusiasm that is often lacking at appearances by the incumbent president, an older, more conventional politician. Obama has also come up with far more relatable and focused economic messages than Biden has managed – ironically performing the same role for the current president as another ex-president, Bill Clinton, performed for him in the 2012 campaign – a service that led Obama to dub the 42nd president “the explainer-in-chief.”

    Obama’s talent for oratory is undiminished and he looks like he’s having great fun showing it off. He’s like a basketball star who after years retired makes a comeback and suddenly starts draining three-pointers. And his popularity means he can drop into the most crucial states where candidates running away from Biden’s unpopularity wouldn’t welcome a visit from the president.

    Yet Obama’s prominence is a reminder of the kind of A-list political talent that the modern Democratic Party lacks. It’s an indictment that its best messenger first ran for president 14 years ago.

    But despite his rhetorical impact, the question is now how effective Obama will be in driving out the vote. The former president often struggled while he was in office to translate his stardust onto other Democratic candidates and lesser talents. And the question in this election is whether he’s simply preaching to the converted in addressing Democrats who already planned to vote, or whether he’s actually making the sale to independents and disaffected anti-Trump Republicans who Biden badly needs to show up to vote for his party.

    Former Obama political strategist David Axelrod, who is now a CNN commentator, said that this onetime boss is being used by his party on a specific electoral mission.

    “In the main, this is the time when you try and get your base out and for Democrats this is really important because the reason why incumbent parties generally lose in midterm elections is that their base is not as motivated as the out-of-office party which tends to come and vote its grievances,” Axelrod said. “There is an enthusiasm gap, at least in the polls, between Republicans and Democrats.”

    While Obama is rekindling memories of a past presidency, Trump is out on the trail seeking to build the foundation for a future one.

    The most recent ex-president has demonstrated the extraordinary hold he still has on the Republican Party by promoting and endorsing a roster of candidates in his election-denying image. There is a question, however, whether Trump’s role in orchestrating inexperienced or extreme nominees, like senatorial candidates like Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, Herschel Walker in Georgia and Blake Masters in Arizona, could cost his party the critical seats in swing states that will decide control of the Senate.

    Republican officials have worried all election cycle about the former president putting his own political ambitions ahead of his party. Many still blame his false claims of voter fraud for helping two Democrats, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, win Senate seats in Georgia runoffs, which enabled their party to control the 50-50 chamber with the help of the tie-breaking vote cast by Vice President Kamala Harris.

    While he’s heading out in to the country again, Trump has not been doing his normal routine of multiple rallies in the most closely contested states.The GOP has succeeded in the last few weeks in returning the focus of the election to Biden, high inflation and the economic anxieties that are spooking voters.

    But there are increasing signs that Trump may not wait much longer to announce a 2024 bid, not least because he has already signaled he would use a presidential campaign to brand legal investigations he faces related to his hoarding of classified documents in his home in Mar-a-Lago and his conduct leading up to the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021, as proof of political persecution.

    “They are weaponizing the Justice Department,” Trump said at his rally Thursday, accusing Democrats of a transgression of which he himself was guilty when he was in the White House and treated attorneys general as his personal lawyers.

    Former Trump White House senior counselor Kellyanne Conway praised the former president for not taking the focus off the GOP’s midterm message, a decision that may repay him with a radical Republican House majority that he could use to weaken Biden in the run-up to the 2024 election.

    “He’d like to have done it already. … I think you can expect him to announce it soon,” Conway said of Trump’s anticipated campaign launch. “He’s being urged by some people to still have a November surprise.”

    “Donald Trump is just getting started. I think you should keep your cellphone on,” Conway told reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast on Thursday.

    The former president used his rally in Iowa to tease a new campaign.

    “I will very, very, very probably do it again,” he said, drawing cheers from the crowd.

    If he follows through, this midterm is unlikely to be the last election when Trump and Obama cross swords on the campaign trail.

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  • Exclusive: DOJ mulling potential special counsel if Trump runs in 2024 | CNN Politics

    Exclusive: DOJ mulling potential special counsel if Trump runs in 2024 | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    As Donald Trump inches closer to launching another presidential run after the midterm election, Justice Department officials have discussed whether a Trump candidacy would create the need for a special counsel to oversee two sprawling federal investigations related to the former president, sources familiar with the matter tell CNN.

    The Justice Department is also staffing up its investigations with experienced prosecutors so it’s ready for any decisions after the midterms, including the potential unprecedented move of indicting a former president.

    In the weeks leading up to the election, the Justice Department has observed the traditional quiet period of not making any overt moves that may have political consequences. But behind the scenes, investigators have remained busy, using aggressive grand jury subpoenas and secret court battles to compel testimony from witnesses in both the investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his alleged mishandling of national security documents kept at his Palm Beach home.

    Now federal investigators are planning for a burst of post-election activity in Trump-related investigations. That includes the prospect of indictments of Trump’s associates – moves that could be made more complicated if Trump declares a run for the presidency.

    “They can crank up charges on almost anybody if they wanted to,” said one defense attorney working on January 6-related matters, who added defense lawyers have “have no idea” who ultimately will be charged.

    “This is the scary thing,” the attorney said.

    Trump and his associates also face legal exposure in Georgia, where Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election in the Peach State and expects to wrap her probe by the end of the year.

    Indicting an active candidate for the White House would surely spark a political firestorm. And while no decision has been made about whether a special counsel might be needed in the future, DOJ officials have debated whether doing so could insulate the Justice Department from accusations that Joe Biden’s administration is targeting his chief political rival, people familiar with the matter tell CNN.

    Special counsels, of course, are hardly immune from political attacks. Both former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and special counsel John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the FBI’s Russia probe came under withering criticism from their opponents.

    The Justice Department declined to comment for this story.

    The Justice Department has brought in a brain trust for high-level advice on the Trump investigations, according to people familiar with the moves.

    Top Justice officials have looked to an old guard of former Southern District of New York prosecutors, bringing into the investigations Kansas City-based federal prosecutor and national security expert David Raskin, as well as David Rody, a prosecutor-turned-defense lawyer who previously specialized in gang and conspiracy cases and has worked extensively with government cooperators.

    Rody, whose involvement has not been previously reported, left a lucrative partnership at the prestigious corporate defense firm Sidley Austin in recent weeks to become a senior counsel at DOJ in the criminal division in Washington, according to his LinkedIn profile and sources familiar with the move.

    The team at the DC US Attorney’s Office handling the day-to-day work of the January 6 investigations is also growing – even while the office’s sedition cases against right-wing extremists go to trial.

    A handful of other prosecutors have joined the January 6 investigations team, including a high-ranking fraud and public corruption prosecutor who has moved out of a supervisor position and onto the team, and a prosecutor with years of experience in criminal appellate work now involved in some of the grand jury activity.

    Taken together, the reorganization of prosecutors indicates a serious and snowballing investigation into Trump and his closest circles.

    The decision of whether to charge Trump or his associates will ultimately fall to Attorney General Merrick Garland, whom President Joe Biden picked for the job because his tenure as a judge provided some distance from partisan politics, after Senate Republicans blocked his Supreme Court nomination in 2016.

    Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

    Several former prosecutors believe the facts exist for a potentially chargeable case. But Garland will have to navigate the politically perilous and historic decision of how to approach the potential indictment of a former President.

    In March, Garland avoided answering a CNN question about the prospect of a special counsel for Trump-related investigations, but said that the Justice Department does “not shy away from cases that are controversial or sensitive or political.”

    “What we will avoid and what we must avoid is any partisan element of our decision making about cases,” Garland said. “That is what I’m intent on ensuring that the Department decisions are made on the merits, and that they’re made on the facts and the law, and they’re not based on any kind of partisan considerations.”

    Garland’s tough decisions go beyond Trump. The long-running investigation of Hunter Biden, son of the president, is nearing conclusion, people briefed on the matter say. Also waiting in the wings: a final decision on the investigation of Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz, after prosecutors recommended against charges.

    It likely won’t take long after the midterms for focus to shift to the 2024 presidential race. That could incentivize top DOJ officials to make crucial charging decisions as quickly as possible, including whether to bring charges against Trump himself or other top political activists, other sources familiar with the Justice Department’s inner workings say.

    “They’re not going to charge before they’re ready to charge,” one former Justice Department official with some insight into the thinking around the investigations said. “But there will be added pressure to get through the review” of cases earlier than the typical five-year window DOJ has to bring charges.

    Matters could also be complicated by the situation in Georgia, where Willis is investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election there. Willis has said she’s aiming for a special grand jury to wrap up its investigative work by the end of the year.

    Willis has observed her own version of a quiet period around the midterm election and is seeking to bring witnesses before the grand jury in the coming weeks. Sources previously told CNN indictments could come as soon as December.

    Key Trump allies, including South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows are among witnesses that have tried to fight off subpoenas in the state probe into efforts to interfere with the Georgia 2020 election.

    How those disputes resolve in Georgia – including whether courts force testimony – could improve DOJ’s ability to gather information, just as the House Select Committee’s January 6 investigation added to DOJ’s investigative leads from inside the Trump White House.

    The months leading up to the election have provided little respite from the political and legal activity around the investigations. The DC US Attorney’s Office–which is still shouldering the bulk of the January 6 investigations–has dealt with burnout in its ranks, as prosecutors are taking to trial or securing guilty pleas from more than 800 rioters who were on the grounds of the Capitol and still look to charge hundreds more.

    Trump has also foiled the DOJ’s efforts to keep things quiet in the weeks leading up to the election, leading to a steady barrage of headlines related to the investigation.

    Trump’s legal team successfully put in place a complicated court-directed process for sorting through thousands of documents seized from Mar-a-Lago, to determine whether they’re privileged and off limits to investigators. But the Justice Department and intelligence community have had access for weeks to about 100 records marked as classified that Trump had kept in Florida.

    The outcome of the intelligence review of those documents may determine if criminal charges will be filed, according to one source familiar with the Justice Department’s approach.

    Yet in both investigations, under-seal court activity never subsided, with the Justice Department trying to force at least five witnesses around Trump to secretly provide more information in their grand jury investigations in Washington, DC, CNN has previously reported.

    On Tuesday a federal judge ordered Trump adviser Kash Patel to testify before a grand jury investigating the handling of federal records at Mar-a-Lago, according to two people familiar with the investigation.

    Judge Beryl Howell of the DC District Court granted Patel immunity from prosecution on any information he provides to the investigation— another significant step that moves the Justice Department closer to potentially charging the case.

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  • Biden’s plea for democracy is a strong election-closing argument for a different election | CNN Politics

    Biden’s plea for democracy is a strong election-closing argument for a different election | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Joe Biden’s eloquent defense of democracy was a message Americans needed to hear. But it was not the one voters most want now from their president – that relief is at hand from the soaring cost of living.

    Biden’s speech Wednesday, delivered blocks from the US Capitol that was ransacked by ex-President Donald Trump’s mob on January 6, 2021, was a strong election-closing argument. But for an election other than the one taking place next week.

    That’s not to say that the warning was misplaced. The fact that Biden felt the need to say, “We can’t take democracy for granted any longer,” underscores the grave threat posed to America’s core values by political violence and election denialism. If a president does not safeguard this historic legacy, who will? The chaos and violence Trump incited after the 2020 election show what unfolds when a president chooses to try to destroy democracy for personal gain.

    Biden’s speech was deeply personal, reflecting his own view of the mission handed him by history. It was also highly political given that the midterm elections, which feature scores of pro-Trump candidates spouting his stolen election nonsense, are only five days away. And it came days after the latest shocking example of political violence – the attack on the 82-year-old husband of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. And since Biden launched his 2020 campaign as a quest to save America’s soul from what he sees as the aspiring autocracy of Trump, it was a statement of a mission unaccomplished – as well as a potential opening volley of a possible 2024 showdown for the White House between the 45th and 46th presidents.

    “You have the power, it’s your choice, it’s your decision, the fate of the nation, the fate of the soul of America lies, as it always does, with the people,” Biden told voters.

    Elections should be about more than one thing. Voters can walk and chew gum at the same time. But the harsh truth is this: In Washington, where just a glimpse of the towering Capitol dome reminds politicians and their media chroniclers of the January 6 horror, the threat to democracy feels visceral.

    But in the heartlands of Pennsylvania, the suburbs of Arizona and cities everywhere, the gut check issue is less the somewhat abstract and age-old concept of self-government. It’s the more basic one of feeding a family. This is an election more about the cost of a cart full of groceries or the price of a gallon of gasoline than America’s founding truths.

    As Scottsdale, Arizona, retiree Patricia Strong told CNN’s Tami Luhby: “The price of everything was better during Trump,” adding, “We were looking forward to retirement because everything was good.”

    Declining stock markets have hurt retirement accounts and Americans with credit card debt took another blow Wednesday when the Federal Reserve raised its short-term borrowing rate by another 0.75%. There are fears the Fed’s strategy could pitch the economy into recession and ruin one of the best aspects of the Biden economy – the low unemployment rate.

    Biden’s argument is implicitly that while inflation will fall, and economic damage can be repaired, the current election – and its legions of anti-democratic Republican candidates – could cause political wreckage that is beyond mending.

    But it’s a tough case to make in such a doom-laden political environment for Democrats. The millions of Republicans who believe Trump’s falsehoods about the last election don’t listen to Biden and his call for national unity anyway. His low approval ratings don’t help. And in a new CNN/SSRS survey published on Wednesday, for instance, 51% of Americans said inflation and the economy was most driving their vote in the midterms. Abortion – the issue Democrats hoped would save them next Tuesday after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade this summer – was the only other concern in double figures, polling at 15% of likely voters. And voting rights and election integrity – the focus of the president’s speech on Wednesday night – polled at only 9%.

    But Biden effectively asked voters to make a concern well down the list of their priorities the decisive factor when they cast their ballots.

    “This year, I hope you’ll make the future of our democracy an important part of your decision to vote, and how you vote,” he said. “Will that person accept the outcome of the election, win or lose?” he added, at the end of a campaign in which several GOP nominees have not guaranteed they would accept voters’ will.

    In places where Biden is unpopular, Democrats in tight races have made an explicit point about distancing themselves from the national party.

    “You know, the national Democratic Party has never been really good at strategic political decisions. So you know, it is not a surprise here, and thank God that I have enough experience that I’ve built this campaign not needing them and we really don’t want them at this point. We’re gonna do this thing with all the grassroots people we have here,” Rep. Tim Ryan, who is in a tight race for US Senate in Ohio against J.D. Vance, told “CNN This Morning” on Thursday.

    It’s not that Biden hasn’t been also talking about high prices. His pitch is that the billions of dollars of spending in his domestic agenda will lower the cost of health care, lift up working families and create millions of jobs. That may be the case, but things that could happen in the future can’t ease the pain being felt now.

    While Biden may be talking at cross purposes with the electorate on these issues, they are linked, in a fateful way, that he did not mention in his speech at Union Station on Wednesday evening. The president’s failure – whether it is all his fault or not – to quell inflation and the worries of a nation already demoralized by a once-in-a-century pandemic created the electoral conditions that look likely to restore Trumpism to power, in the form of a volatile, extreme GOP majority in the House of Representatives at least, with the Senate still on a knife’s edge.

    Throughout history, inflation has often been a pernicious political force that breeds desperation in an electorate and seeds extremism as a potential response. That’s why politicians fear it so acutely and why it is so curious that the Biden White House initially didn’t take the surge of prices that seriously, repeatedly insisting that this was a “transitory” problem caused by Covid-19.

    The president also renewed his call for national unity that he delivered in his inaugural address in front of a still violence-scarred Capitol in 2021. He explained that American democracy was primarily under attack because “the defeated former president of the United States refuses to accept the results of the 2020 election.”

    “He has abused his power and put the loyalty to himself before loyalty to the Constitution. And he’s made the Big Lie an article of faith in the MAGA Republican Party – a minority of that party,” Biden said, being careful not to insult every GOP voter as he did when referring to “semi-fascism” earlier this year.

    The president also argued that Trump’s threat was far broader now than it was in the 2020 election. “As I stand here today, there are candidates running for every level of office in America: for governor, Congress, for attorney general, for secretary of state who won’t commit – who will not commit to accepting the results of the elections they’re running in,” the president warned.

    Biden also hinted at a lack of understanding of Trump’s MAGA supporters, who have embraced his anti-democratic, populist, nationalist appeal to mainly White voters, which grew out of a backlash to the first Black presidency of Barack Obama. The 44th president has been making his own searing defenses of democracy and repudiation of Trump on the midterm election campaign trail in recent days.

    “You can’t love your country only when you win,” Biden said. The president is right – the essence of democracy depends on the loser in an election accepting the verdict of the people. This is why Trump’s behavior was so noxious in 2020 since his refusal to admit defeat did not just ruin one election. It tore at the fundamental principle of the political system that made America great two-and-a-half centuries before Trump’s political career and caused damage that will long outlast the shockwaves of one administration.

    But the essence of the Trump message exists in direct contradiction to Biden’s logic. Such voters can only love their country when their party wins because they see the Democrats that they lose to as the antipathy of their vision of America itself. These dueling understandings of what America actually means are at the core of the current, great political struggle that will not just play out next Tuesday, but in the 2024 election and beyond.

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  • Lula da Silva will return to Brazil’s presidency in stunning comeback | CNN

    Lula da Silva will return to Brazil’s presidency in stunning comeback | CNN

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    Sao Paulo
    CNN
     — 

    Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva has been elected the next president of Brazil, in a stunning comeback following a tight run-off race on Sunday. His victory heralds a political about-face for Latin America’s largest country, after four years of Jair Bolsonaro’s far-right administration.

    The 76-year-old politician’s win represents the return of the left into power in Brazil, and concludes a triumphant personal comeback for Lula da Silva, after a series of corruption allegations lead to his imprisonment for 580 days. The sentences were later annulled by the Supreme Court, clearing his path to run for reelection.

    “They tried to bury me alive and I’m here,” he said in a jubilant speech to supporters and journalists on Sunday evening, describing the win as his political “resurrection.”

    “Starting on January 1, 2023, I will govern for the 215 million Brazilians, not just the ones who voted for me. There are not two Brazils. We are one country, one people, one great nation,” Lula da Silva also said.

    He will take the reins of a country plagued by gross inequality that is still struggling to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic. Approximately 9.6 million people fell under the poverty line between 2019 and 2021, and literacy and school attendance rates have fallen. He will also be faced with a deeply fractured nation and urgent environmental issues, including rampant deforestation in the Amazon.

    This will be his third term, after previously governing Brazil for two consecutive terms between 2003 and 2010.

    The former leader’s victory on Sunday was the latest in a political wave across Latin America, with wins by left-leaning politicians in Argentina, Colombia and Chile. But Lula da Silva – a former union leader with a blue-collar background – has sought to reassure moderates throughout his campaign.

    He has built a broad alliance including several politicians from the center and center-right, including historical opponents from the PSDB, Brazil’s Social Democrat Party. Among these politicians is his vice-president, former São Paulo governor Geraldo Alckmin, who has been cited by the Lula camp as a guarantee of moderation in his administration.

    On the campaign trail, Lula da Silva has been reluctant to show his cards when it came to outlining an economic strategy – a tendency that earned sharp criticism from his competitors. “Who is the other candidate’s economy minister? There isn’t one, he doesn’t say. What will be his political and economic route? More state? Less state? We don’t know…,” said Bolsonaro during a live transmission on YouTube on October 22.

    Lula da Silva has said that he would push Congress to approve a tax reform which would exempt low-earners from paying income tax. And his campaign received a boost from centrist former presidential candidate Simone Tebet, who came third in the first round earlier this month and gave Lula da Silva her support in the run-off. Known for her ties with Brazil’s agricultural industry, Tebet said in an October 7 press conference that Lula da Silva and his economic team had “received and incorporated all the suggestions from our program to his government’s program.”

    He has also received the support of several renowned economists highly regarded by investors, including Arminio Fraga, a former president of the Brazilian Central Bank.

    Lula da Silva received more than 60 million votes, the most in Brazilian history, breaking his own record from 2006.

    But despite the huge turnout from his supporters, his victory was by a narrow margin – Lula da Silva won 50.90% of the vote and Bolsonaro received 49.10%, according to Brazil’s electoral authority.

    His biggest challenge now may be unifying a politically fractured country.

    Hours after the results were announced, Bolsonaro had yet to concede defeat or make any public statement. Meanwhile, videos on social media showed his supporters had blocked highways in two states to protest against Lula da Silva’s victory.

    “We will only leave once the army takes over the country,” one unidentified Bolsonaro supporter said in a video taken in the southern state of Santa Catarina.

    Lula da Silva will need to pursue dialogue and rebuild relationships, said Carlos Melo, a political scientist at Insper, a university in São Paulo. “The president can be an important instrument for this as long as he is not only concerned in addressing his base of voters,” he said.

    Supporters of Lula da Silva react as they gather on the day of the Brazilian presidential election run-off, in Brasilia, Brazil October 30, 2022.

    With more than 58 million votes cast for his rival Bolsonaro – who had been endorsed by former US President Donald Trump – Lula da Silva will have to form “pragmatic alliances” with parts of the center and the right that bought into his predecessor’s politics, adds Thiago Amparo, professor of law and human rights at FGV business school in São Paulo.

    At the same time, he will have to deliver to match supporters’ expectations, Amparo added. “Many voters went to the ballot expecting that, not just to get rid of Bolsonaro, but with memories of better economic times during Lula’s previous governments.”

    Many will be watching for potential change to the 2017 Labor Reform Act, which subjected more workers’ rights and benefits to negotiation with employers, and made union contributions optional. Lula da Silva had said previously that he would revoke the act but recently changed the verb to “review” following criticisms from the private sector.

    He may find that enacting his agenda is an uphill battle, Amparo warns, especially with a hostile Congress. Seats that were from the traditional right are now occupied by the far right, who are not open to negotiation and not easy to deal with, underlines Amparo.

    In the latest elections, Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party increased its representatives in the lower house from 76 to 99, while in the Senate it doubled from seven members to 14. Lula da Silva’s Workers’ Party has also increased its number of deputies from 56 to 68 and senators from seven to eight – but overall, conservative-leaning politicians will dominate the next legislature.

    That friction will require some compromises, points out Camila Rocha, a political scientist at the Cebrap think tank. “[Bolsonaro’s] Liberal Party will have the highest number of representatives and important allies and will make real opposition to the government, [Lula da Silva’s] Worker’s Party will have to sow a coalition with [traditional rightwing party] União Brasil in order to govern, which means the negotiation of ministries and key positions,” Rocha told to CNN.

    A supporter of Lula da Silva reacts while gathering with fellow supporters on the day of the Brazilian presidential election run-off, in Brasilia, Brazil October 30, 2022.

    Environmentalists meanwhile will be watching Lula da Silva’s administration closely, as it assumes governance not only over the Brazilian nation but over the planet’s largest forest reserves.

    With destruction of the vast Amazon rainforest reaching record levels under Bolsonaro’s presidency, Lula da Silva has repeatedly said during his campaign that he would seek to curb deforestation. He has argued that protecting the forest could produce some profit, citing the beauty and pharmaceutical industries as potential beneficiaries of biodiversity.

    In an interview with foreign press in August, Lula da Silva called for “a new world governance” to address climate change and stressed that Brazil should take a central role in that governance, given its natural resources.

    According to the head of Lula da Silva’s government plan, Aloizio Mercadante, another tactic will be to create a group including Brazil, Indonesia and Congo ahead of the UN-led November 2022 Conference of Parties. The group would aim to pressure richer countries to finance the protection of forests as well as outlining strategies for the global carbon market.

    Several experts told CNN they believed his stance on environment and the climate issue could represent a fresh start in Brazil’s international relations.

    For Amparo, environmental protection could indeed be springboard for Brazil’s global leadership, a major shift after Bolsonaro warned the world away from intervening in the destruction of the Amazon. “Lula would try to reposition, almost like a rebranding, Brazil in the international arena as a power to be taken into account,” he said.

    “We can expect a government that goes back to talking to the world, especially with a new stance in the environmental area,” said Melo, the Insper researcher.

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  • A White House speechwriter on writing for Obama, Biden as Kool-Aid man and being a ‘full Swiftie’ | CNN Politics

    A White House speechwriter on writing for Obama, Biden as Kool-Aid man and being a ‘full Swiftie’ | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The idea for Cody Keenan’s New York Times best-selling first book came from a viral tweet storm.

    It’s a genesis rich with irony for a man who rose to prominence as President Barack Obama’s chief speechwriter, toiling in a windowless West Wing office (the “speech cave,” as Obama’s wordsmiths called it) as he drafted tens of thousands of words for the 44th President.

    But the fact it took two years for Keenan to fully grasp the depth of meaning captured by the weight and stakes of a 10-day period that shaped the country underscores the reality of his job – really any job – in a White House.

    At the end of June 2015, Keenan and his team were responsible for drafting remarks on Supreme Court rulings that would eventually uphold the Affordable Care Act and establish the fundamental right to marry for same-sex couples – as well as remarks if the court had ruled differently on each case.

    That was all happening as Keenan grappled with his own personal struggle – and Obama’s – to find the words to come to terms with the nationwide horror resulting from the murder of nine Black Americans attending a Bible study at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

    Keenan is an engaging and almost charmingly self-deprecating Chicago native in person and has been traveling the country on a full-throttle book tour over the course of the last several weeks. But as I read the book on a recent Air Force One trip with President Joe Biden to the West Coast, I kept thinking of things I wanted to ask him that would expand on various elements of the book.

    Full disclosure, I was covering the White House during the time period the book focuses on for Bloomberg News and knew Keenan at the time. He is unflinchingly loyal to Obama, who he continued to work for in the four years after they left the White House. He is a true-blue Democrat, even if that’s more of a backdrop of his experience than a defining feature.

    But the reason I shot him a note asking to chat was to see if he’d dive a little deeper into his writing process – both in speechwriting and as an author – and into the rich portrait he paints of what it’s like to work in a White House at the most senior level.

    A few days after giving his daughter, Gracie, the experience of her first Northwestern University football tailgate – his alma mater lost to Wisconsin by five touchdowns, which Keenan admirably acknowledged was a valuable early life lesson – we connected as I sat a couple hundred feet away from the building that he called his office for eight years.

    CNN: Part of the reason I wanted to read the book is obvious – I was covering the White House at the time, it was a tsunami of history and news and I was kind of intrigued to see it from your end. But I think the more salient thing for me is that I’m fascinated by the process, just the insight into how anyone at a high level approaches their job – there’s so much you can learn. And there’s an extraordinary amount of detail in here on exactly that. But one thing I kept wondering throughout was, man, were you just taking copious notes like 24/7 while you were here?

    Keenan: I was not, I promise, because when we first joined the White House – this is gonna sound like a joke, but it’s not – they were very adamant that any notes you take, any journals you take belongs to the National Archives and not you. So, they actually cautioned us against keeping notes.

    But one of the lucky things is within the Oval Office, I would transcribe all of my conversations with the President on my laptop, because that’s how I wrote my speeches – I would ask, and prompt, and get him going.

    So, all of our conversations in the Oval are verbatim, just because I would type it down super-fast because I needed that material for speech writing. So, I did have those.

    But the rest of it is memory – there’s a mix of emails to myself. But there was no notebook or journal or anything like that.

    CNN: As you’ve talked to people since the book has been out, what are the elements that you hear … from people who don’t understand how this place works, that they’re most surprised about? Beyond the fact that you worked in a cave.

    Keenan: A lot of people been surprised by a few things. Number one, and this is gonna make you roll your eyes, but how much we all liked each other, which I think is really rare in any company, any business, let alone a White House. We were family – I mean literally, I met and married my wife (Kristen Bartoloni, the White House research director) there.

    But also, that it’s just a slog. And I wanted to convey the struggle to do good work. Because you don’t just ride into town and do everything you said you were gonna do. It is really, really difficult. And for the 2,922 days we were there, a good night was when you could go home just feeling like you’ve moved the ball forward a little bit. Because all of those inches eventually add up to a touchdown.

    You know, the Obamacare ruling, the marriage equality ruling – those were the result of not just years of our effort, but decades of other people’s effort. Democracy is hard. That’s what I wanted to convey.

    Also, there’s still people out there who aren’t convinced that Barack Obama was an active speechwriter. He was our chief speechwriter. He was involved in every speech – you know this from being there. Writing for him was very, very difficult just because he was so good at it and expected a lot from us. And we expected a lot of ourselves we tried to get in the first draft.

    CNN: I wanted to dig in on that, because you’re very candid about the kind of “imposter syndrome” that almost seemed pervasive. The reason it struck me is one, because I think I identify with it, and I think many rational people probably would. But two, in this town where everybody acts like they know everything and often know nothing at all, you don’t usually see it laid out in such a detailed manner.

    Did it come from who you were working for and his reputation as a writer and orator? Or is that just you generally?

    Keenan: It’s mostly working for him and never really believing I earned it.

    But we all felt that way, whatever our jobs were. None of us felt like we had earned the right to be there, or just deserve to be there. We all had impostor syndrome – and I think that’s a good thing. Because that is what constantly pushed us to do our best work and prove that we deserved to be there.

    And you know, maybe this is a little unfair because I don’t actually know any of the Trump people, but I never got the sense that they felt the same way. I always got the sense they felt like they were entitled to be there and deserved to be there. And I think as a result, the country didn’t get their best effort.

    CNN: You get into it a little bit, but the process of working underneath (Obama’s first chief speechwriter Jon Favreau) to being “the guy” – what was that like? How did you become the heir apparent?

    Keenan: The great thing about Favs was for all of his fame – and he became famous on the first campaign because Obama’s speeches were different, you know Favs was the wunderkind who dated actresses and was famous. But he never acted that way, he did not have an ego. Everyone wanted to be around him, but he was a patient and generous mentor who taught me almost everything I know about speechwriting.

    The way it just kind of unfolded was when we moved into the White House, I was the junior speechwriter on the team and so I made myself a workhorse. I did like four speeches a week and just worked my butt off.

    But I drafted the Tucson eulogy (for the victims of the 2011 shooting in the attack on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords), and (White House press secretary Robert) Gibbs outed me on the plane to everybody without my knowledge. We were flying back from the eulogy and some of the press corps asked, “Who helped the President with those?” And Gibbs said it’s Cody Keenan, and then he took the … step of spelling out my name to the press corps.

    I still don’t know who asked, but obviously there’s a lot of Northwestern grads in the press corps and one of them said “proud Northwestern Wildcat.” We got back to (Joint Base) Andrews at like 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. or something, and I just slept in. I slept in till like 10 before going back to work. And I woke up to 300 emails and a bunch of missed calls. And that’s a little unusual.

    And Savannah Guthrie was calling and trying to get me on the show and I was just like “what the f— is happening?” I didn’t know at that point that Gibbs had done that and that was weird.

    Losing your anonymity is a little uncomfortable. And there were reporters calling my parents and my sister and I don’t blame them because you guys are just – the way this system works is you guys are desperate for news. But that was a little a little scary to lose your anonymity like that.

    But shortly after that, Favs named me his deputy and I moved over (from the Eisenhower Executive Office Building) to the West Wing into an office with him. That’s when I got to start working with Obama more closely. It was a flight back from LA, Favs was with him on Air Force One and he said, “Look, I’ve been with you for eight years now and I think it’s time for me to move on.”

    And Obama asked him, “Do you have anybody in mind to replace you?” And he said, “Yeah, I think it’s Cody.” Then Obama said, “I think that’s right.” It was as simple as that, but still, when he told me that when he got home, I was like, “You’ve gotta be kidding me!”

    CNN: How did that change the dynamic of your relationship with the President?

    Keenan: It’s hard to be speechwriter for somebody if you don’t spend a lot of time with them. And just the way the White House works, junior speechwriters didn’t get to spend a lot of time with him. Favs was good about making sure we got to if there was a big speech, but from then on, I was with Obama almost every single day. That’s really the best way to get into his head and be able to understand not just what he wants to say, but why. And that changed everything. I got email privileges to email him, I got walk-in privileges to the Oval and that just kind of vaulted me up the ranks, not just in title, but also as a better speechwriter for him.

    CNN: You reference “the muse” in the book – the moments when the President fully engaged on a speech you’d drafted and really elevated something in his own voice. Was that a crutch as a writer? Could you count on that if you were stuck or was that a risk you couldn’t take?

    Keenan: It was a risk and it always made me nervous when he’d say – and he didn’t say it often – but sometimes he’d say, you know, “We’ll see if the muse strikes.” And we were just like “Oh, no.” And sometimes it didn’t. But when it did, it would hit in a big way.

    Like Charleston, you know, I’m very clear about this in the book, he just kind of tore up the back half figuratively. And fortunately, the muse hit really hard. The speech that I’d spent three days agonizing over, he re-wrote in three hours and that came from a mixture of things. The muse hit for him, it was what those families did, forgiving the killer. It was his correspondence with his pen pal, Marilynne Robinson, who I didn’t know existed. And it was the fact that the Supreme Court has ruled on marriage by morning and it just kind of gave him this open heart.

    But, man, there were times when I would turn in a draft and be like, God, I hope he can make this better.

    CNN: When he struck out the last two pages of the Charleston draft, I think you wrote that he just put a giant X through the pages – honestly, if an editor did that to me, I’d be ready to fight them. How do you react to that and not want to lose your mind?

    Keenan: I wasn’t ready to fight him because I knew he was right. And I knew when I turned it in, and I told him as much, that I just could not get it there. And it was his idea to use the lyrics to “Amazing Grace” not just to sing, but to build the structure to the back half of the speech.

    And again, it just sounds like Kool-Aid drinking, but this is the kind of boss he was he could have just given it back to me and said, you know, you need to do better. Or even worse, you could have just excised me from the equation. He could have given them back to Denis (McDonough, the chief of staff) or Valerie (Jarrett, Obama’s closest adviser), and just said, “give this to Cody” and not talked to me at all. But the fact that he brought me in, walked me through them and told me, made me feel better and said, “Listen, we’re collaborators. You gave me what I needed to work with here.”

    I mean, just to take the little bit of time to do that makes all the difference in the world. It’s the difference between a speechwriter who loses his self-confidence forever, or one who just remains determined to keep doing better.

    CNN: Which I don’t think is necessarily the norm in terms of bosses in DC – which I guess I always had a sense of because you guys are all still so loyal to him, but this was one of the better anecdotal demonstrations of it that I’d read.

    Keenan: Yeah. It’s very rare in politics, but I think anywhere to have a boss like that. It’s just really special and makes a big difference to your team. We just had a wedding a couple of weeks ago, where two staffers got married to each other – Joe Paulson and Samantha Tubman – and Obama was there. You know, the fact that he flew across country just to attend their wedding is just to show you what kind of guy he is.

    CNN: But was there ever a time you – look, you say it didn’t bother you when he would cross out two pages or have three pages of handwritten notes because you knew he was right – but was there ever a time when you thought he was wrong?

    Keenan: It was pretty rare. But there were a couple of times, and he valued us pushing back on him. He liked it. He disdains groupthink. And it would really drive him nuts if everyone in the Oval would almost kind of nod and say I agree. I agree. Agree. He would find the person who didn’t, and he wanted to hear what that person had to say, and it didn’t necessarily mean he changed his mind, but sometimes he did.

    CNN: When did you actually know you want to write this book?

    Keenan: It’s interesting, not at the time. You know, you’re not thinking as you go through, OK, this is day six, you’re just living it with everybody else.

    And it really coalesced for me on the second anniversary of day 10 of the book, which is marriage equality and Amazing Grace and the White House lit up like a rainbow. Trump had done something that morning, who remembers what at this point. He was just pissing everybody off with an 8 a.m. tweet, and I realized it was the second anniversary of those 10 days, so I did like a mini tweet storm to kind of remind people about what happened in those 10 days … and what we were capable of and it just kind of took off.

    It was really like my first viral tweet and Esquire magazine wrote it up and that was the first time I thought that there’s a story here. I was still working for him. I worked for him for four more years and it didn’t feel right to write a book while he was paying me, so I didn’t start writing till 2021. But I started thinking about it in 2017.

    CNN: Were you pinging ideas off him at all or sending him drafts throughout? Or did you wait until it was done to show it to him?

    Keenan: I did. I told him all about it as I was thinking it through while I was still working for him. Then I left on New Year’s Eve 2020. And my wife got pregnant shortly after. Then the pandemic hit so everything kinda got put on hold. But I sent him a really early draft back in March and I took some risks. I knew that if there’s a book about him, it’s likely he’s going to read it quickly. And he got back to me within about four days.

    If you think that waiting for him to get his feedback on a speech draft is agonizing, try sending him your book. But he sent back nicer praise than he had ever sent me on speech. And he offered one edit for the book, just one, that actually really did make it better, because he just can’t help himself.

    But it was a relief to kind of get his stamp of approval, especially on the parts that I tried to be really honest about, which is what it was like to be a White speech writer writing for the first Black president I really wanted to make sure I didn’t get that wrong. And fortunately, to hear him say, “this is dead on,” was a nice thing.

    Keenan is seen on

    CNN: I was struck by that specific issue when I was reading. You’re very candid about your efforts to grapple with writing about race – particularly for the first Black president – as a White guy from the North Side of Chicago. It’s really the backdrop of the way you thread together the process of writing the Charleston speech. Was there ever a moment where you’ve felt comfortable with that dynamic, or you felt like you understood his perspective and voice so well that you weren’t going to have to grapple with that reality?

    Keenan: I think it’s related to imposter syndrome. And a lot of that actually became clear, too, after George Floyd, where we all tried to get better. And you can view yourself as being on the right side of these issues, but how do you really know if you’re actually doing injustice?

    To be a speechwriter you have to be able to write for anybody and it requires a sense of empathy and to be well read. But what does a White kid from the north side of Chicago really know about inhabiting the life of a Black man in America? There just – there are limits to the imagination. And so that’s why we’re trying to grab him before those bigger speeches and be like, “Help me with the story I’m trying to tell. Am I right? Is my take right on this or is my life experience getting in the way?”

    It helped that he was really our chief speechwriter, but he would also talk us through it and made sure that we were approaching these issues from the way he wanted us to approach them.

    CNN: Just a couple more before I have to jog over to Pebble Beach (on the White House North Lawn) and be on TV and you probably have another dozen events for your best-seller. Do you feel like you got better as a writer as the years went on?

    Keenan: Yes. You know, I look at my early stuff and I cringe. I still go back and edit some of our biggest speeches – that never goes away. I go back and edit my book, but I absolutely got better and that’s just a result of being around Jon Favreau, being around Barack Obama, being around my entire team – Ben Rhodes, Adam Frankel, Sarada (Peri) – everybody made me a better speechwriter. I’m very honest in the book, and I’m not just trying to be self-deprecating for self-deprecating’s sake. This was a hard, hard job. But I knew that by the end I was really good at it. That just doesn’t mean that you think you’re better than Barack Obama at this – you know you’re not. So, that’s what kind of always kept me on my toes and that’s why I stuck around for eight years.

    CNN: You don’t mention the current president a ton in the book, but you do mention his decision to get out in front of (President Obama) on gay marriage and I believe the reference was he was kind of like Kool-Aid man busting through the wall to announce his view – I think I remember that correctly.

    Keenan: *laughter*

    CNN: But unlike some in the administration – at least at the time – who weren’t pleased at all, you describe it in a way that seems to convey you found it somewhat endearing. And the context very much reflects of how his close friends/advisers describe how he operates – he’d had a personal experience a couple of weeks prior and just answered the question with what he was thinking.

    In that sense, how did you view him inside the White House when you were there, and how do you view him now?

    Keenan: The marriage equality thing was just Joe being Joe. I never saw – I was never like really in intense national security meetings with Biden and Obama. But I never saw Joe Biden to be calculating. He just does what he thinks is right. The people that need him are really what move him. There’s no way that Joe Biden sat there and calculated, “I’m going to come out before the President on this.” He was just with gay people and their kids and was like, “you know what, this is the right thing to do.” And as probably the highest, probably the highest-ranking Catholic in America, at least in politics, that makes a big difference. So, I love Joe Biden. He just governs with his heart, which I think is a great place for a politician to be.

    CNN: You also briefly mention Biden’s current (director of speechwriting) Vinay (Reddy) – you wrote he sent a thoughtful note to you before the Charleston speech. I’ve always had the sense that you have a similar approach to what Obama wanted, which is you’re just going to keep your distance from the folks that are in now because you dealt with plenty of people who thought they knew the best way to do things when you were there. Is that fair?

    Keenan: Absolutely. It drove me nuts whenever I saw pundits on TV saying look, here’s what Obama needs to say, here’s what Obama needs to say. We’ll figure that out. The last thing Vinay needs from me is me being out there saying, “Here’s what Joe Biden needs to say.” He knows. To be a speechwriter, it is hard to find the words sometimes, it is hard to juggle competing audiences and competing interests. Whenever Vinay has asked me for help, I have offered it, but otherwise I’m not going to jump in there.

    CNN: Last one, probably the most dangerous one: Do you feel like your reputation was bolstered or undercut by the admission that you listened to Taylor Swift’s “1989” on repeat while drafting the 2015 State of the Union address?

    Keenan: I have met people on tour who have proven it has bolstered (my reputation). I’m a full Swiftie-man now. My daughter was born to “Folklore.” That’s the album Kristen wanted playing when she was in labor. And you know what, her song “The One” puts Gracie to sleep instantly, so I will always be grateful to Taylor Swift.

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  • Opinion: The relentless bravery of Iranian protesters is a moral test for the Western world | CNN

    Opinion: The relentless bravery of Iranian protesters is a moral test for the Western world | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: Frida Ghitis, (@fridaghitis) a former CNN producer and correspondent, is a world affairs columnist. She is a weekly opinion contributor to CNN, a contributing columnist to The Washington Post and a columnist for World Politics Review. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.



    CNN
     — 

    On the 40th day after Mahsa Amini died while in the custody of the Iranian regime’s intrusive morality police, protests sparked by her death grew even more widespread, more defiant, more determined.

    They also added to the moral imperative for the rest of the world to do more.

    In Amini’s birthplace of Saqqez, where the 22-year-old also known as Zhina is now buried, thousands of people defied the police and turned out to mark an important day in the mourning process, even as security forces fired live bullets and tear gas to stop them.

    Demonstrations also took place in numerous other cities: In Isfahan, women waved black scarves in the air, chanting “Azadi, Azadi!” (“Freedom, freedom!”) in Farsi. In Shiraz, young women walked confidently on city sidewalks without veils, their hair flowing in the air in violation of Iranian law. In Amol, where authorities have already shot and killed protesters, unarmed men and women marched directly toward armed security forces, kneeled, put their hands up, and declared themselves ready to die for their cause.

    While Amini’s death has become the trigger for this uprising, it is the mandatory headscarf, or hijab, that’s become its symbol, because her run-in with the morality police was so familiar to so many women. She was visiting Tehran from her hometown in Iran’s Kurdish region last month when she was detained for, allegedly, not properly wearing her hijab – a degrading experience familiar to Iranian women who are routinely harassed for minor clothing infractions. Authorities later claimed Amini died of an illness while at a “re-education center.” Her family says she was perfectly healthy.

    In the weeks since, the regime has killed hundreds of peaceful protesters, among them many children and idealistic young women.

    One of the teenagers whose bravery and death has become a rallying cry is Nika Shahkarami, a 16-year-old who disappeared last month after waving her hijab in the air at a protest in Tehran, and then setting fire to another headscarf in front of a small crowd.

    Nika later turned up dead. Though Iran’s government and state media have claimed her death had nothing to do with the uprising, a CNN investigation found video and witness testimony showing she was hunted down by plain clothes Basiji militias – security forces utilized by the regime to crack down on demonstrators – following her protest. Eyewitnesses told CNN they saw Nika among groups of protesters being detained later that night. That was the last time she was seen, days before her battered body was returned to her grieving family. Now her mother, too, is rallying protesters.

    The courage of Iranians, young and old, risking it all for a chance at freedom, is defying the predictions of jaded foreign observers. Recalling previous failed protests, many have argued that the strength of this one, with its shouts “Women, life, freedom,” was little more than a doomed social media mirage.

    But the protests are persisting. Seven weeks in, they have lasted longer than any uprising since the 1979 revolution toppled the Pahlavi regime and brought to power today’s theocracy. And these protests are different from their predecessors. In 2009, the Green Movement supported a reformist candidate. In 2019, demonstrators called out harsh economic conditions.

    This time, women, and the men who have joined them, are crying out, “Death to the dictator.” This is not about reform. This is about fundamental change.

    Let’s be honest. From the first day of protests, this has been inspiring, but also terrifying to watch. We have seen what the Islamic Republic is capable of. We fear for the safety of these brave people, and it can seem irresponsible to encourage them. The odds, after all, are stacked against them. And yet, they have made the choice to continue the fight. They deserve our solidarity.

    As a group of 12 female foreign ministers declared in an October 26 statement, “we have a moral obligation” to support this women-led movement. But the people demanding their freedom in Iran need more than symbolic backing – even if symbols matter.

    The United States and other Western powers have always worried about backing Iranian protesters, because the regime already dismisses those who oppose them as tools of the West. The Obama administration allowed such concerns to muzzle its response during the 2009 protests. The Biden administration is trying not making the same mistake – already, Washington has spoken out repeatedly in support of the protest movement. On Wednesday, the State Department announced new sanctions against Iranians involved in repressing demonstrations.

    That’s a good start. Anyone – regime officials, the Basiji militias, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps – involved in crushing the protests should be banned from entering the US. Other countries should follow suit.

    But much more can be done.

    Germany this week announced that, given the situation, there can be no “business as usual,” with Iran, launching a wide-ranging diplomatic response that includes a review of bilateral trade and financial relations, support for nongovernmental organizations monitoring crimes against protestors and expanded protections for “particularly vulnerable Iranians,” among other efforts.

    The US, its other allies, democracies across the world and any country that rejects the regime’s actions should join in isolating Iran diplomatically. Diplomatic relations should continue, but as long as Iran is killing protesters, relations should be downgraded. And Iran must be expelled from the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Its presence there is a travesty.

    Then there’s the matter of the abandoned 2015 nuclear deal – the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA – which the Biden administration has been working to reinstate. Currently, negotiations to revive the deal, designed to delay Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon, are stuck because Iran keeps raising the stakes. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has said he foresees no return to the JCPOA in the “near term.” Such phrasing likely means the goal of reviving it has not died entirely.

    The US and its allies want to keep Iran from having a nuclear weapon, an unimpeachable objective. But restarting the deal could bring hundreds of billions of dollars to the regime that is currently killing peaceful protesters, arming Russia with killer drones used to slaughter innocent Ukrainians and continuing to support terrorist groups across the Middle East. At the very least, the wisdom of reviving the nuclear deal must be reevaluated.

    The relentless bravery of the Iranian women, of the Iranian people, is a timely moral test for the rest of the world. They deserve more than they have received.

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  • With the fate of affirmative action in the hands of the Supreme Court, these graduates are fighting to save it | CNN

    With the fate of affirmative action in the hands of the Supreme Court, these graduates are fighting to save it | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    For nearly 60 years, institutions of higher education have been able to give limited preference to people of color and women with admissions.

    The practice, advocates say, has afforded marginalized people a fair chance to attend colleges and universities that may have otherwise overlooked them. It has also been a tool to prevent discrimination at institutions, many of which historically only admitted White students.

    Now the fate of affirmative action is in the hands of the conservative majority Supreme Court. On Monday, justices will hear arguments for two cases at Harvard and the University of North Carolina.

    The challenges are being spearheaded by conservative activist Edwin Blum who filed the lawsuits in 2014.

    The Harvard challenge cites Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits schools receiving federal funds from discriminating based on race. The UNC lawsuit also claims Title VI grounds, as well as a violation of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the law, which covers state institutions.

    The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights is among the groups that will be defending the constitutionality of affirmative action before the Supreme Court.

    Genevieve Bonadies Torres, associate director for the Educational Opportunities Project for the committee, said affirmative action has led to college campuses becoming more diverse. In return, Black and brown students are able to achieve “profound economic mobility” and uplift their communities, Torres said.

    “What we know from both experience and research is that when colleges stop considering race, they have seen steep declines in the number of Black and Hispanic students who gain access,” Torres said. “Students of color are less likely to apply once they stop considering race because they see them as less inclusive and welcoming.”

    Torres said in 2015 students at both Harvard and UNC got involved in the cases by submitting letters and testifying about their experience on each campus and the importance of diversity.

    CNN spoke with three of the college graduates involved about why they believe affirmative action should be upheld.

    Cecilia Polanco grew up in a working-class family to parents who immigrated to the United States from El Salvador. Polanco said her father worked construction and her mother was a seamstress who also cleaned homes to provide for their family.

    She said her parents allowed her to focus on school because they wanted a better life for her. Neither had the opportunity to finish school in El Salvador.

    Polanco said she worked twice as hard and took AP courses in high school. She knew that as a Latina child of immigrants, she didn’t have the same resources as her White counterparts.

    In 2011, Polanco was selected as a Morehead-Cain Scholar at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill which offered her a full ride scholarship.

    Polanco said she believes affirmative action helped “level the playing field” so that students of color like herself could receive such a prestigious scholarship.

    “If we had a more equitable and just society, we wouldn’t need something like affirmative action,” Polanco said. “But we do because our society is unjust.”

    Polanco recounted being one of few students of color in some of her college classes and reading hurtful comments online from people who said she only got into UNC because the school had to meet a diversity quota.

    But she didn’t let it deter her. She ultimately became a staunch advocate for affirmative action and was eager to contribute to the court case.

    Now Polanco works as a community organizer in Durham, North Carolina where she focuses on philanthropy, racial equity and youth organizing.

    “I think affirmative action helps see the ways in which I didn’t have some of the same opportunities as other people, as my White counterparts,” Polanco said. “There are many valuable life experiences that I had that made me a valuable asset to UNC.”

    Polanco plans to be in Washington D.C. today as the Supreme Court hears arguments in the case. She believes the high court will ultimately uphold the practice.

    “I’m definitely feeling optimistic,” Polanco said. “I feel like I’d be surprised if it went the other way.”

    Andrew Brennen said he has always faced reminders that he is Black.

    Andrew Brennen

    From high school peers asking why he didn’t fit the stereotypical Black teen to being one of few Black students in his classes at UNC, Brennen said he never felt completely accepted.

    He recounted one class discussion about affirmative action at UNC when a White student questioned whether some Black students were fully qualified to be at the university. Brennen also witnessed the protests on UNC’s campus when the “Silent Sam” Confederate statue was toppled.

    With college campuses still battling racism, Brennen fears that overturning affirmative action could only make matters worse.

    “The evidence is pretty clear that when admissions officers are not able to take race into account, diversity on campus suffers,” Brennen said. “These efforts to hold folks accountable for the history and current day racism on campus are led by students of color. And the reality is that our schools need to be as diverse as the workplaces and societies that we are supposed to be preparing to move into.”

    Brennen said he was eager to offer his perspective when the North Carolina Justice Center asked him to write a letter in support of affirmative action for the case.

    Brennen, the son of two attorneys, credited affirmative action for the success of his family. His parents, he said, both grew up poor but were able to attend law school and pursue legal careers.

    Brennen said his parents instilled the importance of education in him and taught him how affirmative action had helped many Black families prosper.

    Brennen graduated from UNC in 2019 with a degree in political science. He now works for a social change venture.

    “There are people out there who want to exploit the fact that affirmative action somehow means that your White kid is going to suffer,” Brennen said. “I think that hugely mischaracterizes what affirmative action is doing.”

    Affirmative action, he said, gives everyone, regardless of race, a fair shot at a quality education and success.

    Brennen said he worries that the conservative majority Supreme Court won’t agree.

    “While I’m confident that our attorneys are making strong, constitutionally-backed, precedent-based arguments in support of affirmative action, I’m nervous that this court doesn’t care,” Brennen said.

    Thang Diep experienced confusion over his identity throughout his childhood.

    Diep said he immigrated with his family from Vietnam to the U.S. (Los Angeles) at the age of 8 and didn’t speak much English. As he gradually learned the language, he still had a thick accent and classmates teased him throughout the grade school. Some would call him Chinese when really he was Vietnamese. As Diep settled into American life, he watched his father travel back and forth to Vietnam for work so he could still provide for the family. Diep’s mom didn’t work and stayed home.

    Thang Diep

    When it came time to apply for colleges, Harvard was not on Diep’s radar.

    “It seemed out of reach and this impossible thing,” Diep said.

    But three days before the admissions application was due, his mother encouraged him to take a chance and apply. Diep said in his admissions essay, he wrote about his struggles with racial identity and fitting in during grade school.

    Diep ultimately was accepted and studied neuroscience at Harvard.

    When Diep was asked to write a letter in support of affirmative action while attending Harvard, Diep jumped at the opportunity. He believed Asian Americans, particularly Southeast Asian Americans, had been left out of the conversation and wanted the world to know that they too support affirmative action. Asian Americans, he said, are not a monolith. Contrary to the “model minority” stereotype, some Asian Americans come from working- class families like he did, Diep said.

    “I think we live in society where race plays a critical role in our experiences and what access to resources we have,” Diep said. “One way we can make the education system better is to acknowledge and take into account these barriers.”

    Diep now works for a nonprofit that works to combat domestic violence.

    Diep said he will be in Washington D.C. rallying around affirmative action with other college graduates and students. He said he stands in solidarity with all communities of color that are fighting to keep affirmative action.

    “I feel like there is some sense of optimism,” Diep said. “I hope that this will become an educational opportunity to spread awareness about the impact.”

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  • Time to treat North Korea’s nuclear program like Israel’s? | CNN

    Time to treat North Korea’s nuclear program like Israel’s? | CNN

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    Seoul, South Korea
    CNN
     — 

    As a statement of intent, it was about as blunt as they get.

    North Korea has developed nuclear weapons and will never give them up, its leader, Kim Jong Un, told the world last month.

    The move was “irreversible,” he said; the weapons represent the “dignity, body, and absolute power of the state” and Pyongyang will continue to develop them “as long as nuclear weapons exist on Earth.”

    Kim may be no stranger to colorful language, but it is worth taking his vow – which he signed into law – seriously. Bear in mind that this is a dictator who cannot be voted out of power and who generally does what he says he will do.

    Bear in mind too that North Korea has staged a record number of missile launches this year – more than 20; claims it is deploying tactical nuclear weapons to field units, something CNN cannot independently confirm; and is also believed to be ready for a seventh underground nuclear test.

    All this has prompted a growing number of experts to question whether now is the time to call a spade a spade and accept that North Korea is in fact a nuclear state. Doing so would entail giving up once and for all the optimistic – some might say delusional – hopes that Pyongyang’s program is somehow incomplete or that it might yet be persuaded to give it up voluntarily.

    As Ankit Panda, a Stanton senior fellow in the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, put it: “We simply have to treat North Korea as it is, rather than as we would like it to be.”

    From a purely factual point of view, North Korea has nuclear weapons, and few who follow events there closely dispute that.

    A recent Nuclear Notebook column from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists estimated that North Korea may have produced enough fissile material to build between 45 and 55 nuclear weapons. What’s more, the recent missile tests suggest it has a number of methods of delivering those weapons.

    Publicly acknowledging this reality is, however, fraught with peril for countries such as the United States.

    One of the most compelling reasons for Washington not to do so is its fears of sparking a nuclear arms race in Asia.

    South Korea, Japan and Taiwan are just a few of the neighbors that would likely want to match Pyongyang’s status.

    But some experts say that refusing to acknowledge North Korea’s nuclear prowess – in the face of increasingly obvious evidence to the contrary – does little to reassure these countries. Rather, the impression that allies have their heads in the sand may make them more nervous.

    “Let’s accept (it), North Korea is a nuclear arms state, and North Korea has all necessary delivery systems including pretty efficient ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles),” said Andrei Lankov, a professor at Kookmin University in Seoul and a preeminent academic authority on North Korea.

    A better approach, some suggest, might be to treat North Korea’s nuclear program in a similar way to Israel’s – with tacit acceptance.

    That’s the solution favored by Jeffrey Lewis, an adjunct professor at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey.

    “I think that the crucial step that (US President Joe) Biden needs to take is to make clear both to himself and to the US government that we are not going to get North Korea to disarm and that is fundamentally accepting North Korea as a nuclear state. You don’t necessarily need to legally recognize it,” Lewis said.

    Both Israel and India offer examples of what the US could aspire to in dealing with North Korea, he added.

    North Korea held what it called

    Israel, widely believed to have started its nuclear program in the 1960s, has always claimed nuclear ambiguity while refusing to be a party to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, while India embraced nuclear ambiguity for decades before abandoning that policy with its 1998 nuclear test.

    “In both of those cases, the US knew those countries had the bomb, but the deal was, if you don’t talk about it, if you don’t make an issue out of it, if you don’t cause political problems, then we’re not going to respond. I think that’s the same place we want to get to with North Korea,” Lewis said.

    At present though, Washington shows no signs of abandoning its approach of hoping to persuade Pyongyang to give up its nukes.

    Indeed, US Vice President Kamala Harris underlined it during a recent visit to the DMZ, the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.

    “Our shared goal – the United States and the Republic of Korea – is a complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” Harris said.

    That may be a worthy goal, but many experts see it as increasingly unrealistic.

    “Nobody disagrees that denuclearization would be a very desirable outcome on the Korean Peninsula, it’s simply not a tractable one,” Panda said.

    One problem standing in the way of denuclearization is that Kim’s likely biggest priority is ensuring the survival of his regime.

    And if he wasn’t paranoid enough already, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (in which a nuclear power has attacked a non-nuclear power) will have served as a timely reinforcement of his belief that “nuclear weapons are the only reliable guarantee of security,” said Lankov, from Kookmin University.

    A TV screen at a railway station in Seoul, South Korea, shows an image of a North Korean missile launch on October 10, 2022.

    Trying to convince Kim otherwise seems a non-starter, as Pyongyang has made clear it will not even consider engaging with a US administration that wants to talk about denuclearization.

    “If America wants to talk about denuclearization, (North Korea is) not going to talk and if the Americans are not talking, (North Korea) will launch more and more missiles and better and better missiles,” Lankov said. “It’s a simple choice.”

    There is also the problem that if North Korea’s increasingly concerned neighbors conclude Washington’s approach is going nowhere, this might itself bring about the arms race the US is so keen to avoid.

    Cheong Seong-chang, a senior researcher at the Sejong Institute, a Korean think tank, is among the growing number of conservative voices calling for South Korea to build its own nuclear weapons program to counter Pyongyang’s.

    Efforts to prevent North Korea developing nuclear weapons have “ended in failure,” he said, “and even now, pursuing denuclearization is like chasing a miracle.”

    Still, however remote the denuclearization dream seems, there are those who say the alternative – of accepting North Korea’s nuclear status, however subtly – would be a mistake.

    “We (would be) basically (saying to) Kim Jong Un, after all of this tug of war and rustling, (that) you’re just going to get what you want. The bigger question (then) of course is: where does that leave the entire region?” said Soo Kim, a former CIA officer who is now a researcher at US think tank RAND Corporation.

    That leaves one other option open to the Biden administration and its allies, though it’s one that may seem unlikely in the current climate.

    They could pursue a deal in which Pyongyang offers to freeze its arms development in return for sanctions relief.

    In other words, not a million miles away from the deal Kim offered then US President Donald Trump at their summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, in February 2019.

    This option has its backers. “A freeze is a really solid way to start things out. It’s very hard to get rid of weapons that exist, but what is possible … is to prevent things from getting worse. It takes some of the pressure off and it opens up space for other kinds of negotiations,” said Lewis of the James Martin Center.

    However, the Trump-era overtones might make this a non-starter. Asked if he thought President Biden might consider this tactic, Lewis smiled and said, “I’m a professor, so I specialize in giving advice that no one is ever going to take.”

    But even if the Biden administration was so inclined, that ship may have sailed; the Kim of 2019 was far more willing to engage than the Kim of 2022.

    And that, perhaps, is the biggest problem at the heart of all the options on the table: they rely on some form of engagement with North Korea – something entirely lacking at present.

    Kim is now focused on his five-year plan for military modernization announced in January 2021 and no offers of talks from the Biden administration or others have yet turned his head in the slightest.

    As Panda acknowledged, “There’s a set of cooperative options which would require the North Koreans being willing to sit down at the table and talk about some of those things with us. I don’t think that we are even close to sitting down with the North Koreans.”

    And, in fairness to Kim, the reticence is not all down to Pyongyang.

    “Big policy shifts in the US would require the President’s backing, and I really see no evidence that Joe Biden really sees the North Korean issue as deserving of tremendous political capital,” Panda said.

    He added what many experts believe – and what even some US and South Korean lawmakers admit behind closed doors: “We will be living with a nuclear armed North Korea probably for a few decades to come at least.”

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  • DOJ asks judge to force Trump White House lawyers to testify in Jan. 6 probe | CNN Politics

    DOJ asks judge to force Trump White House lawyers to testify in Jan. 6 probe | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The Justice Department is asking a federal judge to force the top two lawyers from Donald Trump’s White House counsel’s office to testify about their conversations with the former President, as it tries to break through the privilege firewall Trump has used to avoid scrutiny of his actions on January 6, 2021, according to three people familiar with the investigation.

    The move to compel additional testimony from former White House counsel Pat Cipollone and deputy White House counsel Patrick Philbin just last week is part of a set of secret court proceedings. Trump has been fighting to keep former advisers from testifying before a criminal grand jury about certain conversations, citing executive and attorney-client privileges to keep information confidential or slow down criminal investigators.

    But the Justice Department successfully secured answers from top vice presidential advisers Greg Jacob and Marc Short over the past three weeks in significant court victories that could make it more likely the criminal investigation reaches further into Trump’s inner circle.

    Jacob’s testimony on October 6, which has not been previously reported, is the first identifiable time when the confidentiality Trump had tried to maintain around the West Wing after the 2020 election has been pierced in the criminal probe following a court battle. A week after Jacob spoke to the grand jury again, Short had his own grand jury appearance date, CNN reported.

    All four men previously declined to answer some questions about advice and interactions with Trump when they testified in recent months in the secret criminal probe. Trump lost the court battles related to Jacob and Short before the chief judge of the trial-level US District Court in Washington, DC, last month.

    Attorneys for the men whom the DOJ is seeking to compel have declined to comment for this story or haven’t responded to requests. Cipollone and Philbin didn’t respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for the Justice Department also declined to comment.

    All four men have been willing to be as cooperative as the law demands, leaving Trump’s team to handle the fight over certain details in the investigation, the sources say.

    The litigation around Cipollone and Philbin’s testimony may be important for investigators in the long run, given how close the pair was to the Trump leading up to and during the Capitol riot. Prosecutors are likely to aim for the grand jury to hear about their direct conversations with the then-President.

    The disputes – conducted under seal in court because they involve grand jury activity – may also spawn several more court fights that will be crucial for prosecutors as they work to bring criminal charges related to Trump’s post-election efforts.

    Witnesses the federal grand jury has subpoenaed, such as former White House officials Mark Meadows, Eric Herschmann, Dan Scavino, Stephen Miller and campaign adviser Boris Epshteyn, also could decline to describe their conversations with Trump or advice being given to him after the election, several sources familiar with the investigation say.

    Trump and his allies have used claims of confidentiality – both executive privilege and attorney-client privilege – with mixed results in multiple legal quagmires that surround the former President. Those include the January 6 federal criminal investigation, the Mar-a-Lago documents federal criminal investigation, Georgia’s Fulton County investigation of election meddling, and the House select committee probe of January 6 as well. Some of the privilege arguments Trump has raised have never been settled in federal court, and some of the fights could lead to the Supreme Court.

    Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich slammed the “weaponized” Justice Department in a statement and referred to the probes surrounding the former President as “witch hunts.”

    According to the sources, the Justice Department won a trial-level judge’s order at the end of September that said Jacob and Short must testify in response to certain questions over which Trump’s team had tried to claim presidential and attorney-client confidentiality.

    The sealed court case, stemming from the grand jury’s work, had been before the chief judge of the DC District Court, Beryl Howell. Howell refused to put on hold Jacob and Short’s testimony while Trump’s team appealed, a source said.

    The Trump team, meanwhile, took several days to respond to their loss before Howell in court. The Justice Department set a quick-turnaround subpoena date for Jacob, leaving him to head into the grand jury under subpoena on October 6, according to several sources.

    The DC Circuit Court of Appeals is still considering legal arguments from Trump’s defense lawyers and the Justice Department over his ability to make executive and attorney-client privilege claims.

    How that is resolved – either by the appeals court or even the Supreme Court, if Trump pursues it that far – could have significant consequences for the January 6 criminal investigation, and for multiple witnesses who may be refusing to share some of what they know because of Trump’s privilege claims.

    Among a large group of former top Trump officials, Jacob has been one of the most searing voices condemning the then-President’s actions after the election, especially regarding the pressure he and his election attorney, John Eastman, tried to place on then-Vice President Mike Pence to block the congressional certification of the presidential vote.

    Jacob has been a harsh critic of Eastman, who is also of interest to prosecutors, dating back to when Eastman tried to convince Pence’s office the vice president alone could override the vote. He told Eastman at the time the right-wing attorney was a “serpent in the ear” of the President, and wrote while Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, “thanks to your bulls**t, we are now under siege.”

    Jacob added to a parade of star witnesses at public House select committee hearings this summer, speaking candidly about his disgust with what he witnessed inside the White House complex from his high-ranking position administration.

    “There is almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person would choose the American President, and then unbroken historical practice for 230 years, that the vice president did not have such an authority,” Jacob testified in July.

    But what Jacob and Short knew of Trump’s conversations, they wouldn’t disclose to the House nor to the grand jury until this month.

    In a taped House select committee deposition, Cipollone answered many questions about what happened inside the West Wing on January 6 but declined to describe communications between him and Trump.

    Cipollone’s and Philbin’s roles as White House lawyers raise complicated legal questions about whether Trump can claim confidentiality over the legal advice they gave him, as well as whether a former president can assert executive privilege to hold off criminal investigators.

    President Joe Biden has repeatedly declined to assert executive privilege around January 6 information, essentially leaving the fight for Trump to wage opposite the Justice Department.

    While the courts will look at each situation individually, history isn’t on Trump’s side. Federal prosecutors investigating former Presidents Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon were able to overcome attorney-client privilege assertions for White House counsel as well as executive privilege assertions so the grand jury could hear closely guarded information.

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