Pennsylvania Supreme Court Throws Out Votes as Senate Recount Begins

The recount for Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate race won’t count undated or incorrectly dated mail-in ballots, a major blow to voting rights.

In an opinion filed Monday, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that ballots that failed to arrive with a correct handwritten date on the return envelope, and thereby failed to comply with the requirements of the state election code, would not be included in the final vote tally in the race between Senator Bob Casey and his Republican opponent, Dave McCormick.

McCormick was deemed the winner of the race nearly two weeks ago, nabbing 48.9 percent of the vote with 99 percent reporting compared to Casey’s 48.5 percent. As the week wore on and Pennsylvania’s various counties continued to tally their ballots, it became evident that the competitors were separated by fewer than 23,000 votes. By Monday, that number had dwindled to 17,000 out of almost seven million ballots that had already been recounted, reported the Associated Press.

Democratic-controlled election boards in three counties—Montgomery, Philadelphia, and Bucks Counties—had argued that an incorrect date said nothing about the voter’s eligibility to cast their ballot.

The Republican National Committee and the Pennsylvania Republican Party filed an emergency request on Thursday, asking the state Supreme Court for an immediate ruling on the case, contesting that the date was still a key component to ballot security.

The court ruled 4–3 in their favor on Monday, with Justices Kevin Brobson, Sallie Updyke Mundy, Kevin Dougherty, and David Wecht slamming some of the counties for considering the ballots.

“It is critical to the rule of law that individual counties and municipalities and their elected and appointed officials, like any other parties, obey the order of this court. As Justice Felix Frankfurter once wrote: ‘If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can,’” wrote Justice Wecht in a statement, joined by Justice Mundy. “‘That means first chaos, then tyranny.… The greater the power that defies law the less tolerant can this Court be of defiance.’”

The Trump transition team continues to float wildly unqualified people to serve in very important positions.

Politico reported on Monday that the short list to head the Department of Transportation includes Representative Sean Duffy, former Uber executive Emil Michael, and Representative Jenn Denham. 

Duffy, who is on the “short list,” is a former reality TV star and Fox News talking head who has been critical of Trump in the past. Michael is well liked by billionaire Trump surrogate Elon Musk (maybe because he’s an investor in Musk’s SpaceX company). And Denham, perhaps the most qualified, thinks energy-efficient high-speed rail is an example of “runaway government spending.” 

These picks all align with Trump’s bleak pro-business, anti-regulation vision for the Department of Transportation. Enjoy your walkable cities and decent public transportation (if you even have it) while you can.  

House Speaker Mike Johnson didn’t even bother trying to defend the quality of Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees.

During an interview on CNN Sunday, host Jake Tapper asked Johnson about the president-elect’s recent nominations, who represent a slew of ethical dilemmas that might offend a Christian who openly totes his “values” like Johnson does. While the Louisiana Republican may not be offended by any of Trump’s nominees’ policy ideas, one might imagine he’d be offended by their principles—or lack thereof.

Trump’s picks include former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, who allegedly paid two women to have sex with him and has been accused of committing statutory rape (he has denied any wrongdoing); Fox & Friends host Pete Hegseth, who reportedly paid a woman who accused him of sexually assaulting her as part of a nondisclosure agreement (he insists the encounter was consensual); and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaxxer who was caught in a messy extramarital affair during his failed presidential campaign.

“You’re a man of faith, you’re a man of God, you’re a man of family. With some of these nominees, Gaetz, Hegseth, RFK Jr., I wonder, does it matter anymore for Republicans to think of leaders as people who are moral in their personal lives? Is that still important to the Republican Party?” Tapper asked.

“Um, sure. It’s an important issue for anyone in leadership,” Johnson replied, quickly changing the subject. “This is what I’ll say about the nominees that the president has put forward is that they are persons who will shake up the status quo.”

Johnson insisted that Trump’s picks were “disruptors” by design—another way of saying they’re not good guys, but that’s kind of the point.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, though, as Johnson seems to have had no problem cozying up with Trump, a rapist who was convicted of 34 counts for falsifying business records to conceal hush-money payments made to keep an adult film actress quiet about his own extramarital affair.

Now that Donald Trump will be the next president, Republicans are eyeing overhauls to safety net programs like Medicaid and food stamps. 

The Washington Post reports that Trump’s advisers are speaking with Republicans in Congress about making big changes to federal assistance programs to pay for extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. These changes include new work requirements and spending caps, according to anonymous sources familiar with the discussions. 

Some Republicans have misgivings about how such changes will go over with the public, the Post reports, noting that these programs support at least 70 million low-income and disabled Americans.  

“I don’t think that passing just an extension of tax cuts that shows on paper an increase in the deficit [is] going to be challenging,” one Republican tax adviser told the Post. “But the other side of the coin is, you start to add things to reduce the deficit, and that gets politically more challenging.”

Parts of the bill are set to expire in 2025, and extending those provisions will add over $4 trillion to the national debt, which is already high at $36 trillion. Trump’s campaign promises of cutting taxes on tips and overtime will only add to that total. While Republicans say they support Trump’s further cuts, they don’t want more government borrowing, so they are looking for places to save money.

Social welfare programs have long been in Republican crosshairs. For example, Republicans could revive their efforts to cut food stamps, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, especially because the benefit automatically increases with inflation. They could also try to impose more limits on what food products can be bought under the program. But Republicans have taken heat in the past for merely floating cuts to these programs, and Democrats would likely seize on further attempts.

Trump’s 2017 tax overhaul cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans and corporations, and companies used that savings to buy back their own stock instead of doing things that would actually benefit the economy, for instance creating jobs. Extending those provisions would likely lead to more of the same, with the added cruelty of cutting government assistance to the most vulnerable of Americans. 

InfoWars may have been bought and sold out from under Alex Jones, but that doesn’t mean the conspiracy theorist is giving up the fight.

A company affiliated with Jones—First United American Companies, which sells dietary supplements—lost its bid for the far-right network last week, underbidding The Onion, which went on to claim InfoWars as its own. But the saga hasn’t ended there: In an attempt to recoup the lost bid, FUAC accused the bankruptcy trustee overseeing the auction of colluding with the satirical news site, as well as families of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre, to pass over the group’s $3.5 million bid.

But those allegations didn’t fly with the trustee, who on Monday argued in a legal notice that the group’s emergency motion was nothing more than a “disappointed bidder’s improper attempt to influence an otherwise fair and open auction process.

“Having failed in its prior efforts to bully the Trustee and his advisors into accepting its inferior bid, FUAC now alleges, without evidence, collusion and bad faith in an attempt to mislead the Court and disqualify its only competition in the auction,” Christopher R. Murray, the bankruptcy trustee, wrote in the filing.

The Onion reportedly bid $1.75 million for the site, in addition to incentives promised by the Sandy Hook families, who won a $1.5 billion lawsuit against Jones. (The families have since agreed to settle with Jones for a minimum sum of $85 million.) The families “agreed to forgo up to 100% of their share of the Infowars sale proceeds and give it to other Jones creditors,” reported ABC News.

Jones repeatedly claimed that the 2012 shooting that left 20 first graders and six teachers dead was a front to lure voters toward gun control policies.

In the run-up to the auction, Jones had appeared to be under the impression that “good guys” on the right would buy his fringe network, though he did not reveal who they were. Several groups expressed interest in InfoWars assets, including a coalition of liberal and anti-disinformation watchdog groups, according to The Daily Beast, as well as some of Jones’s own supporters, such as Donald Trump ally Roger Stone. The sale, however, has effectively crushed what was arguably Jones’s most successful endeavor while marking the beginning of his descent into irrelevancy.

“We’re obviously disappointed he’s lashing out by creating conspiracies, but we’re also not surprised,” Ben Collins, CEO of The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, said in a statement Monday.

Matt Gaetz, the MAGA Republican congressman nominated to be the next attorney general, allegedly paid two women for sex, according to the lawyer who represented the women before the House Ethics Committee.

Attorney Joel Leppard told ABC News Monday that his clients had testified to the Ethics Committee that they’d been paid for sex through Venmo. “They essentially put the Venmo payments on the screen and asked about them. And my clients repeatedly testified, ‘What was this payment for?’ ‘That was for sex,’” Leppard explained.

Leppard said that one of his clients had also alleged that she saw Gaetz having sex with her 17-year-old friend.

“She testified [that] in July of 2017, at this house party, she was walking out to the pool area, and she looked to her right, and she saw Rep. Gaetz having sex with her friend, who was 17,” Leppard said.

Leppard explained that his client had testified that Gaetz was not aware that the girl was underage.

“Her understanding was that Matt Gaetz did not know that she was a minor, and that when he learned that she was a minor, that he broke off things and did not continue a sexual relationship until she turned 18,” Leppard said.

Gaetz has been the subject of a multiyear ethics investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct, sharing inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, and converting campaign funds for personal use. The House Ethics Committee is set to vote Wednesday on whether to release its report on Gaetz.

Last week, Donald Trump nominated Gaetz to be attorney general, a mind-boggling pick considering that Gaetz has no experience as a judge or government lawyer. Rather, his only qualification is his unfaltering loyalty to the president-elect. The freshly Republican-led Senate will be forced to weigh the allegations against Gaetz when considering his confirmation, and even if the report is not formally released, the serious allegations against him have continued to mount.

A separate lawsuit filed last week involves a number of people involved in the criminal investigation into Gaetz, leading to a new record of evidence outside of the ethics report, according to CNN’s Paula Reid. Gaetz was previously investigated by the Justice Department over allegations that he’d engaged in an inappropriate relationship with a 17-year-old girl and violated sex trafficking laws, but no charges were ever formally filed against him. The evidence entered into this new lawsuit reportedly included the underage victim’s testimony that she’d had sex with Gaetz on an air hockey table.

Gaetz has repeatedly denied any allegations of wrongdoing.

Last week, Senator John Cornyn said that “there should not be any limitation” on the Senate’s investigation into Gaetz, and insisted that he “absolutely” wanted to see the ethics report on the former Florida congressperson, who has since resigned from his seat.

Last week, John Clune, the attorney representing the underaged woman, posted on X urging for the committee to release its report. “Mr. Gaetz’s likely nomination as attorney general is a perverse development in a truly dark series of events,” wrote Clune. “We would support the House Ethics Committee immediately releasing their report. She was a high school student and there were witnesses.”

Oklahoma’s state superintendent of schools, Ryan Walters, wants every teacher in the state to show a video message from him to their classes which shows him praying for Donald Trump. 

Unfortunately for Walters, the state attorney general says that he can’t require students to watch the video, which also announces the creation of a new Department of Religious Freedom and Patriotism, and at least seven of Oklahoma’s school districts say they won’t show it. 

“There is no statutory authority for the state schools superintendent to require all students to watch a specific video,” Phil Bacharach, a spokesman for the Oklahoma attorney general’s office, told The Oklahoman. “Not only is this edict unenforceable, it is contrary to parents’ rights, local control and individual free-exercise rights.”

On Thursday night, Walters sent out an email to Oklahoma’s public school superintendents ordering them to show his one-minute-and-24-second video to students. The email contained several grammatical errors, with Walters writing, “We are in a dangerous time for this country. Student’s [sic] rights and freedoms regarding religious liberties are continuously under assault.”

Walters wrote in the email that the new department “will be working to thwart any attempts to disrupt our Oklahoma student’s [sic] fundamental freedoms.” The video closed with a prayer (which he said students did not have to participate in) where Walters asked for blessings on “President Trump and his team as they continue to bring about change to the country.”

But the superintendents of the Edmond, Mustang, Moore, Norman, Owasso, Tulsa, and Midwest City–Del City public school districts said they would not be showing the video, rebuffing Walters.

On the same day, the state superintendent announced that 500 Bibles had been purchased for Oklahoma’s public schools for about $25,000, despite the fact that lawsuits have been filed over Walters’s attempts to integrate Bibles into school curriculum. Walters’s Bible specifications have also been attacked, as only one Bible seemed to fit the specific requirements: Trump’s “God Bless the USA” Bible. 

Walters’s video and Bible purchases are only his latest attempts to push Christian nationalism in Oklahoma’s public schools, and like his other efforts, are legally questionable at best. After Trump’s election and the GOP’s takeover of Congress, though, Walters is probably feeling quite emboldened to ramp up his agenda.   

Ron DeSantis just can’t seem to drop the wannabe Trump routine. 

The Florida governor will stage an Apprentice-style “extensive vetting” process to determine a replacement for Senator Marco Rubio, who is expected to serve as Donald Trump’s secretary of state pending confirmation. 

“We have already received strong interest from several possible candidates … with a selection likely made by the beginning of January,” DeSantis wrote on X. “Florida deserves a Senator who will help President Trump deliver on his election mandate, be strong on immigration and border security, take on the entrenched bureaucracy and administrative state, reverse the nation’s fiscal decline, be animated by conservative principles, and has a proven record of results.”

DeSantis’s pick will serve until 2026.  Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump, Lieutenant Governor Jeanette Nuñez, Attorney General Ashley Moody, former Florida House Speaker Jose Oliva, and chief of staff James Uthmeier have all been floated as possible replacements for Rubio.

This is yet another example of DeSantis’s weak Trump impersonation, a futile attempt to sell himself to the MAGA base. He took the same position on Ukraine as Trump, has railed against critical race theory and transgender children, claimed that slavery was beneficial to personal development, and even tried standing like the president-elect. 

And yet DeSantis has received nothing for his mimicry, not even Cabinet position. The governor continues to fade into the GOP ether as conservatives continue to choose the real thing.

Donald Trump is going after Iowa pollster Ann Selzer, weeks after she published a preelection poll that found Kamala Harris had “leapfrogged” the former president 47 to 44 percent in Iowa.

“A totally Fake poll that caused great distrust and uncertainty at a very critical time. She knew exactly what she was doing,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social Sunday.

“Thank you to the GREAT PEOPLE OF IOWA for giving me such a record breaking vote, despite possible ELECTION FRAUD by Ann Selzer and the now discredited ‘newspaper’ for which she works. An investigation is fully called for!”

Selzer’s poll had anticipated that Harris would lead Trump by three points in the state. In reality, he won Iowa by 13 points, making for a 16-point error. Until now, Selzer & Co. had been considered the gold standard of polling in the country.

Some have speculated that the Selzer poll’s failure to align with the actual results was because the poll had too many Democrats and college-educated voters. While Selzer’s philosophy of not correcting for these factors has worked in previous election years, this time it accounted for major differences from the outcome of the presidential election in the key swing state.

Trump shared a link to an op-ed Selzer wrote Sunday in The Des Moines Register, which had published her Iowa poll, announcing that she would be moving on from polling altogether.

“Over a year ago I advised the Register I would not renew when my 2024 contract expired with the latest election poll as I transition to other ventures and opportunities,” Seltzer wrote. “Would I have liked to make this announcement after a final poll aligned with Election Day results? Of course.”

After Iowa was called for Trump, his campaign gloated about the win—and called out the pollster by name. “Starting on Day 1 President Trump and Vice President JD Vance will help to ease costs, secure the border, and protect Social Security for retirees like Ann Selzer,” the campaign said in a statement.

While Selzer’s poll wasn’t an accurate predictor of the outcome in that state, it’s far from illegal for a poll to be wrong, and the president-elect’s penchant for targeting those who publish unflattering things about him is cause for serious concern.

“Welcome to the authoritarian weaponization of the state and waste of taxpayer $ on vanity crusades: Anyone whose work seems to criticize the leader or produce results that he does not like must be investigated,” authoritarianism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat warned on X.

An authoritarianism scholar sounded alarm bells that Donald Trump’s incoming Cabinet nominees will do far more than usher a new conservatism into the federal government. Instead, they’ll challenge the system to the point of rendering federal agencies practically ineffective and vulnerable to complete dismantling.

In an interview with MSNBC’s Ali Velshi, Yale history professor Timothy Snyder insisted that Trump’s nominees to lead the executive branch aren’t just “poor choices in the traditional sense.”

“Each of them individually is historically bad,” said Snyder. “But taken together, these are not people who are going to be bad at their jobs in some sort of normal sense. Taken together, these appointments suggest an attempt to actually make the American government dysfunctional, to make it fall apart, to pervert it, to have it do things that it’s not supposed to do until it’s not capable of doing anything at all.”

For instance, Trump’s choice for director of national intelligence, former Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard, regularly amplifies Russian propaganda and conspiracy theories. Her role would have her oversee 18 intelligence agencies, but critics—even in the House Intelligence Committee—have drawn attention to the danger of her nomination considering her particular affinity for foreign dictators such as Syrian President Bashar Al Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Responding to a clip of Gabbard from February 2022—shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine—in which the former Democrat claimed that Ukraine should “embrace the spirit of Aloha” and relinquish any military alliances with NATO or Russia, Snyder argued that “it’s not just that these people are not qualified enough.”

“It’s not just that they’re totally unqualified, it’s that they’re anti-qualified. They are qualified to do the opposite of the thing that they are supposed to do,” Snyder said.

“Tulsi Gabbard is talking about a moment when Russian forces are approaching the Ukrainian capital. When Russian assassination squads are attempting to kill the Ukrainian head of state, and she’s advising people that all we have to do is summon up a magic word, and in effect surrender all of Ukraine to Russia,” Snyder continued. “And it’s not naïve. It sounds naïve but it’s not. What it’s doing is trying to prepare the way for more Ukrainian suffering. It’s saying, he who invades is right.”