Ken Paxton Threatens to Block Democrats From Registering to Vote

It seems that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton will do anything to prevent Texas from flipping for Kamala Harris—including preventing eligible citizens from registering to vote.*

Paxton threatened legal action against Bexar and Harris counties if they proceed with sending out mail-in voter registration forms, which the counties have proposed doing via third-party vendors. Paxton argues that it could encourage noncitizens to register to vote.

Of course, Bexar and Harris aren’t like other counties in Texas. They’re urban and populous, and have a majority or even plurality of Latino voters, according to The Hill. And in 2020 both counties overwhelmingly voted for Joe Biden.

Paxton’s office announced Wednesday that he’d filed a lawsuit against Bexar County Commissioner Court after it approved a proposal that funds the production and mailing of voter registration forms “to unregistered voters in location(s) based on targeting agreed to by the county,” according to KENS-5. Paxton claimed the program was unlawful because it “could induce ineligible people—such as felons and noncitizens—to commit a crime by attempting to register to vote.”

Earlier this week, Paxton had sent a letter to Bexar and Harris county commissioners warning them off of proceeding with any such programs. The threats were nearly identical.

“At best, this proposal is ill-advised because it potentially confuses residents of Harris County about whether they are eligible to vote. At worst, it may induce the commission of a crime by encouraging individuals who are ineligible to vote to provide false information on the form,” Paxton wrote in the letter to Harris County. “Either way, it is illegal, and if you move forward with this proposal, I will use all available legal means to stop you.”

Specifically, Paxton argued that the state had no right to distribute registration forms unsolicited, and pointed to a similar lawsuit he’d filed against Harris County in 2020 when it had tried to push a similar proposal. Paxton previously gushed to Steve Bannon that had he not blocked more than two million ballot applications from being distributed by the state, Texas might have become a battleground state and Donald Trump “would’ve lost the election.”

In reality, there is little to no evidence to demonstrate that noncitizen voting is a significant problem in the United States. In 2016, noncitizen votes accounted for just 0.0001 percent of the votes cast, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Still, it’s a nonissue that Republicans such as House Speaker Mike Johnson, and of course Trump, have continued to tout baselessly throughout the election cycle.

Paxton’s offensive goes even further, to conflate unregistered, but eligible, voters with noncitizens.

His newest action is part of his larger campaign to actively disenfranchise Latino voters in Texas who might support Harris.

Last month, Paxton’s office announced raids and undercover actions against organizations in Texas it accuses of illegally registering noncitizens to vote. In practice, though, the raids have taken place against members of the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, the oldest Latino civil rights organization in the U.S., as well as several prominent Democrats in south Texas.

The raids took place shortly after LULAC had endorsed Harris, the organization’s first presidential endorsement in its nearly 100-year history.

* This story originally misstated Paxton’s office.

Despite efforts to bury the story, the Trump campaign’s New Hampshire scandal is still developing.

A top volunteer with the Trump campaign issued an internal message Sunday notifying fellow volunteers that “the campaign has determined that New Hampshire is no longer a battleground state,” adding that the campaign has no New Hampshire surrogates and no advertising expenditures there. He also wrote that internal polling indicated Donald Trump could lose New Hampshire by a wider margin than he did to Joe Biden in 2020.

That volunteer, Tom Mountain, is reportedly no longer with the campaign, and Trump himself has made it apparent that he intends to keep courting New Hampshire voters through November. But Mountain’s message was, apparently, not a one-off. Instead, other New Hampshire Republicans have also signaled that the race is a done deal, according to CNN correspondent Steve Contorno.

Speaking with Erin Burnett on CNN’s OutFront Tuesday night, Contorno argued that the tides have turned for the Trump campaign among New Hampshire voters.

“When I talked to other Republican operatives in the state, they said that this volunteer is painting a pretty clear picture that’s really illustrative of what’s happening there,” Contorno said.

One such Republican was GOP strategist Mike Dennehy, who said that Trump could lose New Hampshire by six to eight percentage points.

“Now Mike and others have said that there’s still two months left in this race that has already had a lot of twists and turns,” Contorno continued. “So the momentum could shift again. But, Erin, he’s running out of time. And I will point out that he has no advertising reserved for the fall.”

A right-wing religious rights group is fighting Supreme Court reform, and Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, is secretly one of its top supporters.

The First Liberty Institute has a budget of $25 million per year and calls itself “the largest legal organization in the nation dedicated exclusively to defending religious liberty for all Americans.”

On July 31, the head of the institute, litigator Kelly Shackleford, held a private call with his organization’s top donors and read out an appreciative email from Thomas, according to ProPublica, which obtained a recording.

“YOU GUYS HAVE FILLED THE SAILS OF MANY JUDGES. CAN I JUST TELL YOU, THANK YOU SO, SO, SO MUCH,” Thomas’s email read in all caps, Shackleford said. Shackleford added that Thomas also recently met with a First Liberty Institute staffer.

“Great to meet through the meetings today,” Thomas wrote, according to Shackleford. “I cannot adequately express enough appreciation for you guys pulling into reacting to the Biden effort on the Supreme Court.”

“Many were so depressed at the lack of response by R’s and conservatives” to recent court-reform proposals, Thomas’s email reportedly continued.

Shackleford told the donors that he saw the email as proof that judges who “can’t go out into the political sphere and fight” appreciated the organization’s efforts.

“It’s neat that, you know, those of you on the call are a part of protecting the future of our court, and they really appreciate it,” Shackleford said.

Later, Shackleford attacked liberal Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, who supports enforcing ethics reforms on the court, as “treasonous” and “disloyal” and said that an ethics code would “destroy the independence of the judiciary.”

The conference call came days after President Biden announced his support for Supreme Court reforms, including term limits for the court’s justices and a binding code of conduct. Shackleford attacked these and other proposals in the call, calling them “a dangerous attempt to really destroy the court, the Supreme Court” led by “people in the progressive, extreme left” who were “upset by just a few cases.”

Shackleford and Thomas seem to ignore the fact that her husband’s ethical lapses spurred the calls for judicial reform, particularly the many gifts the justice received from conservative megadonor Harlan Crow that he failed to disclose, including luxury vacations and the renovation of the home where Thomas’s mother lives. 

Ginni Thomas, for her part, is a longtime conservative activist who played a suspicious role in the January 6 Capitol riot and efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. This latest revelation seems to indicate that she and her husband have no remorse for their ethically questionable behavior.

Senator Lindsey Graham desperately wants Donald Trump to stop hurling lame insults at Kamala Harris. 

In a New York Times op-ed published Tuesday, the South Carolina Republican urged the former president to see the error of his shallow ad hominem attacks.

“Every day that the candidates trade insults is a good day for her because it’s one less day that she has to defend the failures of the Biden-Harris administration,” Graham wrote. “Far more worthwhile for Mr. Trump is his record of success. The road to the White House runs through a vigorous policy debate, not an exchange of barbs.” 

He then laid out the arguments he would use in a debate, comparing Trump’s policies favorably to Harris’s. 

Graham spent a significant portion of his word count bashing Harris, using a pared-down version of the Trump campaign’s talking points, for instance blaming her administration’s federal spending for booming inflation, although it’s not entirely clear that those two things are connected. 

Graham called immigration the “cornerstone of her portfolio” and criticized Harris for her too-little-too-late support for an aggressive bipartisan border bill—ignoring the fact that Trump had ordered congressional Republicans to kill the measure.

Graham also criticized Harris for doubling back on hydrofracking, and being the “last person in the room” with President Joe Biden before he put the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan into action. 

Trump also has been attacking Harris for these issues, but it’s been buried in the torrent of other meaningless comments about bacon and windmills, false claims that Harris had been the leader of the “defund the police” movement, and gratuitous self-praise for being a “great speaker.” And all of that was just in one day. 

While Trump’s avid fans may enjoy his ridiculous comments, Graham seemed not so impressed. 

To be sure, he also spent inches praising Trump, painting him as the strongman on the international stage, though recent descriptions show he was more like a kid whose lunch got taken for nothing. But laced into Graham’s argument was a strong criticism that Trump needs to get serious if he actually wants to win a debate—not just triumph by default.  

Will Trump take any of this to heart? Outlook not so good. Earlier this month, Graham remarked that Trump “the provocateur, the showman, may not win this election.” Trump responded with a harsh dismissal of his longtime ally, saying, “Look, I like Lindsey. I don’t care what he says, OK?”

Perhaps Lindsey is hopeful that while Trump doesn’t listen to him, maybe he does read the Times? Not likely? Yeah, I didn’t think so either. 

“Average Joe” J.D. Vance has “no doubt” that he and Donald Trump are going to be elected in November—even as polls show that Vice President Kamala Harris’s “politics of joy” are overtaking them on the national stage.

Speaking with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham on Tuesday, the Republican vice presidential pick—who might be best known for his uncanny ability to turn scripted, funny bits into uncomfortable moments that sit and stay with people—brushed off his dismal favorability ratings.

“How do you go to the undecideds at this point, this shrinking pool of people, and convince them that not only are you serious—and you’re seriously smart, but you’re a regular person, I’ve known you for a long time—you’re really fun, you’re really funny, versus the giggle and vibe show that seems to work for a lot of women voters out there?” prompted Ingraham, comparing the Trump-Vance strategy to the Harris-Walz ticket.

“You know, Laura, my approach to this is just to get out there and meet as many people as possible, and I know this is Donald Trump’s approach too,” Vance said. “That’s what I’m going to keep on doing, Laura. I don’t put much stock in the polls, even the polls that show us ahead, and there are a lot of those these days.”

Except, polls seem to consistently show that Harris has either pulled even with Trump or edged ahead.

And actually going out and meeting the American people hasn’t gone so well for Vance. Last week, the Ohio senator had a disastrous P.R. stunt at a donut shop in Valdosta, Georgia, where he couldn’t accomplish one normal human interaction with any of the bakery’s employees. On Thursday, Vance was intermittently booed by a large crowd at the International Association of Fire Fighters conference.

“What I put stock in is the wisdom of the American people, and the fact that if we go out there, make our case, don’t hide behind a teleprompter but get out there and meet people, the American people are going to elect me and Donald Trump,” Vance continued. “I have no doubt about that.”