The Republican Party Is Quickly Collapsing in Michigan

Michigan’s state Republican Party is falling into complete disarray as the Michigan GOP state committee tries to remove its party chair, who claims that such a move is unlawful.

The committee has scheduled a special meeting for Saturday to vote on whether to remove Chair Kristina Karamo. But Karamo argued Tuesday that the meeting has not been lawfully scheduled, and threatened not to abide by the result of the vote.

Karamo has served less than one year of her two-year term. A 2020 election denier and ardent Donald Trump supporter, she ran unsuccessfully for secretary of state in 2022. A few months later, she was elected as the Republican Party’s chairperson.

Her short tenure has been plagued with problems. Her fellow party members have accused her of a lack of transparency and organization, autocratic rule, and even interference with county party business.

In October, Karamo revealed the party was nearly $500,000 in debt. Her opponents slammed her for seemingly failing to do anything to improve the party’s finances.

In a sign of how little support she has from her own Republicans, eight of the 13 district chairs and her own party co-chair signed a letter calling for Karamo’s ousting.

“You were chosen as chairwoman because the majority of the Republican delegates strongly respected your commitment to a new era of transparency, honesty and meaningful involvement on the part of the State Committee,” the letter said. “Regrettably, these policies no longer seem to be a priority in your administration and the Party’s financial stability is quickly deteriorating.”

Karamo pushed back, claiming Tuesday that the meeting had not been called according to party rules. She told the Detroit Free Press that the people who called the meeting “have zero legal authority to conduct business regarding the Michigan Republican Party or its State Committee.”

Under party bylaws, 75 percent of the party must vote against Karamo to remove her. If Karamo refuses to recognize the meeting and its result, it could spark a legal battle over party leadership.

Fox News host Sean Hannity has moved to Florida from New York, citing a desire to be in a state with representatives that share his ideologies.

The far-right anchor announced Tuesday that he was already settled in his new home. He had previously recorded his shows out of his home in Long Island and would go to Fox News’s Manhattan headquarters for live shows.

“I’ve been threatening now to do this for quite a while, but we are now beginning our first broadcast from my new home, and that is in the free state of Florida,” Hannity said on his radio show. “I am out. I am done. I am finished.”

“Finally, for the first time that I can think of in my adult life, I actually have representatives in the state that I’m living in that share my values.”

Florida’s Republican Party controls the state legislature and the governor’s office. This overwhelming amount of power has allowed Governor Ron DeSantis to push through multiple extreme culture-war laws.

Hannity bragged that his new home has “warmer weather, law and order, better education, more freedom, [and] better quality of life.”

The state also has incredibly high insurance premiums as climate change batters the coastline. It has rules restricting everything from what people can wear in public to what books they can read and what bathroom they can use. It has an education system that tries to argue slavery was just a job training program. And DeSantis has antagonized Disney, one of the biggest job creators in the state, setting off a bizarre legal battle.

The move also puts Hannity much closer to Donald Trump. Despite purporting to be a journalist, Hannity appears to be a close adviser and ally to the former president. Hannity appeared onstage at a Trump rally in 2018. Two years later, Hannity helped write one of Trump’s 2020 campaign ads.

One of Donald Trump’s lawyers appeared to accidentally admit that the former president may have engaged in insurrection.

Christina Bobb, a vocal 2020 election denier, tried to argue Tuesday night that voters should be able to elect anyone they want for president.

“The president is elected by the entire nation, and it should be the entire nation who determines who they want for president, whether they are guilty of insurrection or not,” Bobb said during an interview on Real America’s Voice. “It’s up to the people.”

Bobb seems to be arguing that even an insurrectionist should be allowed to run the country, which could be seen as an admission of guilt.

Trump was recently disqualified from the primary ballots in Colorado and Maine, after the Colorado Supreme Court and Maine secretary of state determined that he had engaged in insurrection and was therefore constitutionally ineligible to run for president.

The issue of his eligibility is likely headed to the Supreme Court. Trump appealed the Maine decision Tuesday, and the Colorado Republican Party has asked the nation’s high court to review their state’s decision.

Bobb’s blunder is not the first time that one of Trump’s lawyers, or even Bobb herself, has undermined one of his lawsuits. Bobb signed a sworn statement to the Justice Department in spring 2022 attesting that Trump’s legal team had carried out a “diligent search” of Mar-a-Lago and found only a few files that needed to be returned to the government.

That, of course, proved to be completely false. Bobb came under intense Justice Department scrutiny and ultimately testified in front of the grand jury in the investigation into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents.

In August, two of Trump’s other lawyers also undermined his case. Trump was arraigned in Washington on August 3 for allegedly attempting to overthrow the 2020 election. His defense stems from his claim that he genuinely believed he had won.

But outside the courthouse, attorney Alina Habba confidently stated, “I think that everybody was made aware that he lost the election.”

And just two days earlier, Trump’s lawyer John Lauro decided the best defense is just to admit to everything. Lauro bluntly confirmed that Trump had pressured Mike Pence to delay certifying the votes (which is against the law) and had tried to use fake electors (also illegal).

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene pulled the old “I’m holding it for a friend” excuse when prompted to explain why she was listed among members of Congress with suspiciously high-performing stock portfolios.

On Tuesday, the market analysis watchdog Unusual Whales dropped its annual review of the biggest market traders on Capitol Hill. Democrat lawmakers’ outpaced Republicans’ gains in no small part due to Representative Brian Higgins’s portfolio, which outperformed the S&P 500 Index by nearly 10 times. But quite a few Republicans also made it to the list, including none other than Taylor Greene.

When questioned about appearing on the list, however, Greene pointed a finger at her son.

“I asked my team about that today, about why my name was on the list because I don’t even own any stocks, and I haven’t all of 2023,” Greene said on Fox News’s Jesse Waters Primetime.

“As a matter of fact we have to report everything, including children who are dependents of ours, and I think what was reported was actually related to my son’s account that his father and I had set up for him years ago,” Greene added.

To Greene’s credit, Unusual Whales doesn’t list any new transactions out of Greene’s portfolio for the duration of 2023, though the MAGA politician has made more than a handful of purchases since she took office in 2021 and doesn’t seem to have sold them. That probably explains why she’s ranked on the list, which measures overall returns for the year—not transactions.

But all these gross expenditures and unusually timed trades begs the question: How are our politicians making such informed choices?

Technically, it’s illegal for lawmakers to buy and sell stock based on nonpublic information. In 2012, President Barack Obama signed the STOCK Act, preventing members of Congress from trading based on details obtained through their work, like committee work or entertaining lobbyists.

But as long as a trade is reported in 45 days, U.S. legislators are free to trade however they want, even if the bills they pass or reject could influence a company’s performance and help them line their own pockets.

Pennsylvania Representative Scott Perry could be next on the chopping block, thanks to a new lawsuit by a local Pennsylvania activist.

Gene Stilp, who ran for the state House of Representatives in 2014, claims that Perry’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and his connections to the events of January 6 are enough to warrant a revocation of his candidacy in the state election, on the basis of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment.

“Scott Perry’s own actions and efforts have awakened the application of the Fourteenth Amendment, Section Three, of the United States Constitution, which stops those who participate in insurrectionist activities from serving in certain capacities in the government of the United States,” Stilp told Penn Live.

Stilp wants Pennsylvania’s Secretary of State Al Schmidt to decide whether the unopposed Republican can stay on the ballot.

The effort comes on the heels of two historic decisions by the Colorado Supreme Court and Maine’s secretary of state to boot Donald Trump off their respective GOP primary ballots in February, a groundbreaking reversal that left some top Senate Republicans nonplussed.

Stilp filed another lawsuit against Trump last year in an effort to keep the GOP front-runner off the battleground state’s Republican primary.

Perry, who serves as the chair of the House Freedom Caucus, was “central to the planning of January 6,” according to former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson. A major 154-page report by the January 6 committee also alleged that Perry had “material facts” regarding Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Since January 6, Perry has been embroiled in a three-year legal battle to keep his cell phone records out of the hands of federal prosecutors. Perry’s phone was seized by federal officials in the aftermath of the insurrection. Last month, some of the messages gleaned from Perry’s device were unsealed in a court document, then mysteriously resealed in a move the court has yet to explain, reported the Associated Press.

While Perry has not been charged with a crime related to the insurrection, several of his colleagues similarly involved in the scheme have been, with 18 of them, including Trump, facing charges related to overturning the 2020 election through voter fraud cases and the certification of votes on January 6.