Vermont Republican Sorry for Dumping Water in Dem’s Bag for Months

Republican Vermont state Representative Mary Morrissey apologized to Democrat Jim Carroll this week for a pretty bizarre reason: She was recently caught on video pouring water into her Democratic colleague’s bag, and has apparently been doing so for months.

The incident was first reported by Vermont independent weekly Seven Days. Morrissey said during a state house session Monday that her behavior was “disrespectful” and that she had given a private apology to Carroll, adding that she would work “toward resolution and restoration through our legislative process.” The two represent the city of Bennington in Vermont, and reportedly have known each other since childhood, even attending the same church.

“It was conduct most unbecoming of my position as a representative and as a human being, and is not reflective of my 28 years of service and civility,” Morrissey said, asking for forgiveness from her colleagues and Vermont citizens.

According to Carroll, Morrissey had been treating him badly in public as well. “[She] would say demeaning things in front of other legislators,” Carroll said. Water had been poured into his bag since January, so he set up a camera in the coat rack outside his committee room. Carroll’s videos show someone lawmakers later identified as Morrissey dumping a cup into Carroll’s bag.

According to Carroll, Morrissey said that at first she “flicked” water on the bag because she saw a bug on it. But later, she said she didn’t know why she decided to dump water on Carroll’s bag for months on end.

Seven Days got ahold of the footage from Carroll due to a public records request. “I have been very reluctant to disclose the video because I believe it will deeply embarrass Representative Morrissey,” Carroll wrote in a statement to the outlet. “However, it has become clear to me that the media are aware of the details of Representative Morrissey’s behavior and likely will continue to report on that behavior in the near future.”

Republicans don’t seem to be conducting themselves well in local politics. In May, a local moderate Republican councilman in central New Jersey was arrested after he was caught in a sting operation stealing political signs promoting rival MAGA-aligned conservatives. In that case, AirTags were pinned to the signs to apprehend the culprit.

Donald Trump keeps raising the bar of how far Republicans will go to spin President Joe  Biden’s debate performance. Reminder: it hasn’t even happened yet. 

During his rally in Racine, Wisconsin, on Tuesday, Trump suggested that if Biden performs well during the upcoming presidential debate, he’ll have hard drugs to thank.

“He’s gonna be so pumped up. He’s gonna be pumped up,” said Trump. “You know all that stuff that was missing about a month ago from the White House? What happened?”

As Trump was setting up his punchline, presumably about selling stolen goods to pay for drugs, he lost the plot and pivoted into incoherently rambling about Hunter Biden’s laptop. 

“Who left it? Somebody left it. I wonder, let’s see. Somebody left the laptop in an office of a gentleman who was supposed to fix the laptop from hell,” said Trump. “He never picked it up, and somebody didn’t pick up hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cocaine. I wonder who that could’ve been.”

“I don’t know—actually, I think it was Joe. Ha-ha,” he said, cuing the audience that he had, against all odds, made it to the end of what he wanted to say.

Obvious cognitive decline aside, Trump is once again mindlessly parroting something he heard Sean Hannity say, which has quickly become a regular Republican talking point: that Biden has a secret stash that saves him during public speaking events. Trump previously suggested that Biden was “higher than a kite” during the State of the Union address, and seems adamant on keeping the company line as he heads into the first Biden-Trump debate on June 27. 

In fact, just Monday night, Hannity reiterated his claim to Trump’s daughter-in-law and RNC Chair Lara Trump.

“I think the Joe Biden we see on the debate night is gonna be the guy that we saw at the State of the Union,” Hannity said. “He’s going to be all hyped up, hyper-caffeinated, whatever ‘it’ is.”

Donald Trump elaborated on a shocking threat during his visit to Racine, Wisconsin, Tuesday, warning the crowd that the country will be pushed into World War III if he isn’t re-elected in November.

“Under Crooked Joe Biden, the world is in flames, our border is overrun, inflation is raging, Europe is in total chaos, the Middle East is exploding, Iran is emboldened, China is on the march, and the worst, most incompetent, most corrupt president in history is going to drag us into World War III,” Trump said.

The presumptive GOP presidential nominee had previously used the bleak image while speaking to attendees at CPAC in February, framing a Biden-led U.S. as not just causing the imagined international war, but also losing it.

“We won’t even be in World War III, we’ll be losing World War III with weapons the likes of which nobody has ever seen before,” Trump said at the Nazi-attended conservative conference. “These are the stakes of this election. Our country is being destroyed. And the only thing standing between you and its obliteration is me. It’s true.”

In a Senate hearing Tuesday, Senator Josh Hawley attacked Boeing CEO David Calhoun and urged him to resign.

Hawley grilled the executive on his pay, which this year is $32.8 million, and listed the Boeing disasters of the past year, which are numerous.

“You’re not focused on safety, you’re not focused on quality, you’re not focused on transparency, all of this is on the record,” Hawley said. “But actually, you’re focused on exactly what you were hired to do, which is that you’re cutting corners, you are eliminating safety procedures, you are sticking it to your employees, you are cutting back jobs because you’re trying to squeeze every piece of profit out of this company.”

“You’re strip-mining Boeing. It was one of the greatest American companies ever. It has employed thousands of people in my state, and you are strip-mining it for profit and shareholder value, and you’re being rewarded for it,” Hawley added.

The Missouri Republican certainly sounded like he was saying all of the right things when it comes to Boeing, which has had several scandals over the past several years, particularly with the many involving the 737 MAX plane. But, Hawley’s tough talk belies his record on corporate oversight, which has mostly concerned deregulation and attacking so-called “woke corporations.”

But Boeing is an easy target unpopular with most Americans these days thanks to the bad press over its disasters and the many whistleblowers that have come forward. Hawley has shown similar opportunism after rail disasters, despite receiving thousands in campaign contributions from the railroad industry. Perhaps the senator is worried about his own travel or about his challenger in November’s election, populist Democrat and Marine Corps veteran Lucas Kunce. Whatever the reason, Hawley unfortunately made a great point in his questioning Tuesday. Now, if only it would be followed by regulatory action, which isn’t either Hawley or his Republican colleagues’ strong suit.

Republican Senator Pete Ricketts on Tuesday killed a measure to ban bump stocks—before he and the rest of his colleagues could be embarrassed in a vote on the legislation.

The measure followed a controversial ruling delivered by the Supreme Court last Friday that overturned a ban enacted by Trump. But the Republican senator from Nebraska objected to the bill before a vote could be held, shooting down any hopes of maintaining a ban on the lethal accessory.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer brought the legislation to the floor Tuesday afternoon seeking unanimous consent, which allows a bill to pass so long as there are no votes against it.

“What today’s bill does is return things to the status quo set by Donald Trump, saying bump stocks are dangerous and should be prohibited,” Schumer said Tuesday morning ahead of the floor vote.

“If Republicans block this bill today after claiming to support bump stock bans in years past, shame on them,” Schumer said ahead of the bump stock ban vote on Tuesday afternoon, noting that the “MAGA Supreme Court” went even further to the right than Trump himself. In response to the bill’s introduction, Ricketts wrote it off as “the summer of show vote” by Senate Democrats and claimed the bill would not pass because “some people in this building still believe in the Constitution that affords people in this country their right to own a gun,” seemingly believing a bump stock attachment is a gun.

“I’m going to keep pushing this bill to get this done. I’m going to keep working with anyone who wants to do this, to ban bump stocks in this country once and for all,” vowed Senator Catherine Cortez Masto in response to Ricketts’s block on the bill.

Republicans were expected to vote against the measure en masse, including those who previously said they would support a bump stock ban.

Bump stocks and sales of bump stocks were banned in 2018 by the Department of Justice at the behest of Trump, which reclassified the lethal accessory used in mass shootings under the federal definition of a “machinegun.” Trump’s ban followed the October 2017 Las Vegas massacre where a gunman using an AR-15 altered with a bump stock fired more than 1,000 rounds at concertgoers over the course of 11 minutes, killing 59 people and injuring more than 500.

Friday’s Supreme Court ruling, which stunned survivors of the 2017 Las Vegas massacre, ruled on the basis that bump stocks don’t convert rifles into machine guns because a machine gun allows for continuous shooting while a bump stock allows a shooter to “rapidly re-engage the trigger.” The splitting-hairs distinction conveniently ignored that a bump stock converts the number of bullets that can be shot per minute from “however quickly you can pull the trigger” up to 400 to 800 bullets per minute.

“There’s no law enforcement application for a bump stock. There’s no military application for a bump stock. There’s no self-defense application for a bump stock. These things are, like, tailor-made for mass shootings,” Senator Martin Heinrich said on Tuesday ahead of the vote.