MTG Pushes New Conspiracy as Democrat Takes Lead in Key House Race

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has come up with another conspiracy theory—that Democrats are stealing a very close election race in California. 

In California’s 13th congressional district, the votes are still being counted, and Republican Representative John Duarte fell behind Democrat Adam Gray by a narrow margin Tuesday night. To Greene, this means that something nefarious is going on. 

“Democrats are stealing another House seat! Elections nationwide should be one day, paper ballots, and require proof of citizenship with ID!!” Greene posted on X Wednesday morning. 

California has fully embraced voting by mail, instituting it statewide since 2022. As long as ballots are postmarked by Election Day, they are allowed to arrive no more than a week afterward in order to be counted, an increase from three days afterward in 2022’s midterm elections. That year, half of the state’s votes were counted after Election Day, meaning that a long wait time to count votes is not suspicious. 

In Republican-run states, though, it’s rare for such allowances to exist. In Greene’s home state of Georgia, for example, mail-in ballots aren’t universal but have to be specifically requested well in advance. Ballots have to be received within three days of Election Day, even if the voter is overseas or in the military.  

Greene and her fellow conservatives seem to hold the laughable opinion that the easier it is to vote, the more likely that Democrats and the left are fixing elections. In fact, making voting more widely accessible allows greater participation from the people who are poorer, don’t have easy access to transportation, work long hours, or are disabled, posted overseas, or any number of other valid reasons. 

Even in states like California, things could be made easier through various reforms, such as making Election Day a national holiday. But such efforts have been consistently opposed by Republicans, who have long seen higher voter turnout as a boost to Democrats. Maybe now that Donald Trump and the GOP actually won the popular vote in 2024, they will stop trying to restrict voting access.

The richest man on earth wants to eliminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

“Delete CFPB. There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies,” Elon Musk wrote on X in response to an error-riddled clip of Trump megadonor Marc Andreessen talking about how much he hates pro-consumer regulation on the Joe Rogan show. In the video, Andreessen tells a shocked Rogan that the CFPB is debanking people and companies for “having the wrong politics.”

In reality, the CFPB has put forth measured, bipartisan policy that protects from that very situation.

Director Rohit Chopra recently stated his clear opposition to politically motivated debanking of conservatives and Christians.  

“The CFPB put out a legitimately good rule that went after banks over debanking users based on political views,” reporter Ryan Grim noted. “Now VCs and Musk who don’t like the CFPB for other reasons are straight up lying to whip people into a frenzy and defang the CFPB. The message: they think you are stupid and can’t read and are going to make your life worse in order to enrich themselves.”

Musk, along with Vivek Ramaswamy, will head the Department of Government Efficiency, and is dead set on wiping away large swaths of vital regulation, mostly to benefit people like himself. The CFPB seems to be the latest thing on this chopping block.

“You put a billionaire in charge, and shockingly he finds that an agency which fights for consumers against bank fraud is one of the first government functions that needs to go,” wrote Bernie Sanders adviser Faiz Shakir.

In a disturbing post on X, a Trump-endorsed candidate for the House of Representatives targeted and invoked an anti-Muslim trope against two Muslim members of Congress.

Florida state Senator Randy Fine, who is running to fill the vacancy in Florida’s 6th U.S. congressional district, singled out Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar on Tuesday. Quote-tweeting an endorsement from the Republican Jewish Coalition, Fine posted, “​​The ‘Hebrew Hammer’ is coming. @RashidaTlaib and @IlhanMN might consider leaving before I get there. #BombsAway.”

Tlaib and Omar are two of just three Muslim members of Congress, and the only two Muslim women.

Fine has a history of using demeaning rhetoric against Muslims and Palestinians and trafficking in Islamophobic tropes. In the past, he has said that “we have a Muslim problem in America” and that “while many Muslims are not terrorists, they are the radicals, not the mainstream.”

In August 2021, when Fine was a representative in Florida’s state House, the Council on American-Islamic Relations filed a complaint against him with the House Public Integrity and Ethics Committee, alleging that Fine “violated his duty as an elected official” by “encouraging his constituents to run over people at Palestinian advocacy protests,” “call[ing] for the annihilation of the Palestinian people,” and direct-messaging a Floridian to “blow yourself up,” among other instances of “egregious conduct.”

In September, Fine took to X to cheer the death of 26-year-old American citizen Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, an activist reportedly killed by the Israeli forces while peacefully protesting illegal settlements in the West Bank. “Throw rocks, get shot. One less #MuslimTerror ist. #FireAway,” Fine wrote.

Donald Trump threw his support behind Fine’s candidacy last week, referring to him as an “America First Patriot” in a Truth Social post.

Senior advisers to Kamala Harris’s campaign joined the liberal podcast Pod Save America this week to offer their takes on why their candidate suffered a crushing defeat this election—and seemed to have no real humility about where they went wrong.

Stephanie Cutter, one senior aide who sat down for the joint interview, said the vice president was correct in her refusal to set herself apart from President Biden during the presidential race. Cutter said that Harris “felt like she was part of the administration, so why should she look back and cherry-pick some things that she would have done differently, when she was part of it?”

Cutter added that the thinking within the campaign was that if Harris broke with Biden on a specific issue like immigration, stories would come out from administration staffers questioning why she didn’t take different stances in meetings or challenge specific policies to the president.

Eventually, Harris settled on a prevailing campaign strategy that vice presidents almost never break with their presidents, with the exception of Mike Pence with Donald Trump. Cutler and the podcast hosts, former Obama administration staffers Jon Favreau, Dan Pfeiffer, and Tommy Vietor, then laughed over a “murder” and “ripping up the Constitution” exception.

The clip has drawn indignation and vehement criticism on X for being tone-deaf to voters’ concerns.

One commentator pointed out that there was a good example of a vice president who broke with a president besides Trump and Pence: Hubert Humphrey with Lyndon Johnson in the 1968 election, amid Americans’ outrage and exhaustion over the Vietnam War.

There are many policies in which Harris could have and should have broken with the Biden administration during her campaign, whether it was over steadfast U.S. support for Israel’s war on Gaza or the flawed approach to immigration. But Cutter’s revelation about the Harris campaign’s internal discussions show that there’s also a greater problem: groupthink among Democratic staffers and party leadership. Until the Democrats can express a willingness to dump so-called “conventional wisdom” and aggressively address the issues voters care about, they won’t be able to win again. The hosts of Pod Save America don’t seem to be getting it.

Democrats forgot to read the fine print on a bill and spoon-fed a huge victory to Republicans who want to kill the IRS.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the IRS’s tax enforcement fund, which allowed the IRS to better audit corporations and the wealthiest households, is now $20 billion in the red—leaving the fund’s future up in the air.

In 2022, when Democrats had a trifecta hold over the government, they put $80 billion toward the IRS, which was supposed to help the agency hire, modernize, and enforce through the next decade. When Republicans took the House back in 2023, they started making cuts to that fund to protect their rich friends and corporate interests, placing a $1.4 billion cut and then another $20 billion cut into deals they made with Biden last year.

This year’s stopgap funding bill—meant to keep the government open through December 20—kept the same $20 billion cut in the text. Congressional Republicans noticed that the Democrats didn’t notice its inclusion and watched silently with glee as yet another massive slash was made to one of the most important agencies we have.

“Our concern right now is that because of this risk to the IRS and the uncertainty of it, the IRS is going to potentially have to make dramatic decisions about stopping hiring,” Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo told the Journal. “They are running low on enforcement dollars today.”

Adeyemo also noted that the cuts will force the IRS to do 2,000 fewer large corporate audits over the next five years and 6,000 fewer audits of wealthy individuals.