Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann. Before the news, do us a quick favor: click the ❤️ and hit restack. Those two clicks make it possible for us to break through to the people who really need to read these stories.
Now, here’s what’s happening. Trump’s attempt to gut mail voting weeks before the midterms is officially dead after even the MAGA Supreme Court slammed the door on it. Mitch McConnell made his first public appearance in three months, and his staff ran interference by not allowing anyone to record video of him. Republicans are unable to shake voters’ perceptions of them being racist and antisemitic as incidents of open bigotry keep piling up. And Senate Republicans are already running away from Trump’s latest harebrained $5,000 check scheme. Let’s get into it.
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On Monday night, a majority of Supreme Court justices blocked Donald Trump from forcing states to redesign their mail-in voting systems just a handful of weeks before the midterms.
Trump tried to force the U.S. Postal Service to require states to upload lists of voters to a federal database and add barcodes to ballot envelopes before sending out ballots. Both Democratic and Republican election officials said that was an impossible feat to pull off given the short amount of time they had to do it. Some states, like North Carolina, had already started mailing ballots to voters as this case was being litigated.
Ultimately, the 7-2 ruling was issued as an unsigned, one-paragraph order. The only dissenters were Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, with all three of Trump’s appointed Supreme Court justices striking down the mail ballot restrictions. Brett Kavanaugh, who Trump appointed to the Court in 2018, wrote that state election officials simply didn’t have enough time to put the new requirements in place.
This is the second time in three weeks the Supreme Court has weighed in on Trump’s crusade against mail ballots. This decision came on the heels of Supreme Court justices blocking Missouri Republicans’ heavily gerrymandered congressional redistricting map. They have yet to weigh in on the Department of Homeland Security screening voter eligibility with state databases containing sensitive voter data. Two lower court judges have already stopped that plan from taking effect.
Nearly a third of voters — including Donald Trump himself — voted by mail in 2024. A last-minute rule change by a president who has expressed open disdain for people casting mail ballots would have almost certainly resulted in millions of ballots being thrown out for spurious reasons. Thankfully, the Supreme Court handed out an exceedingly rare loss to Trump over it.
The framers gave states the power to run elections in Article I, Section 4 for a very specific reason. They knew the danger of a executive from afar deciding who got to vote and how. Those seven justices who just rejected Trump’s mail-in ballot rule are simply reading the Constitution the way it was written over two centuries ago.
Republican Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky just made his first public appearance in more than 90 days, after being hospitalized in mid-June. Staffers wheeled him into the Capitol, where the 84 year-old senator delivered a brief statement before heading to the Senate floor. He quipped that after all his time spent dodging reporters’ questions, he wasn’t sure how many journalists would even be there to question him.
But prior to McConnell’s appearance, his staff told reporters they weren’t allowed to record video of the senator. Punchbowl’s Andrew Desiderio confirmed in a post to his X account that reporters were barred from filming McConnell. CNN’s Manu Raju described McConnell as even more frail, with a slower voice. He added that McConnell took no questions from the press.
McConnell was eventually rolled onto the Senate floor to cast his vote on Monday night, where he was greeted by colleagues from both parties. One reporter watching from the Senate gallery said he could faintly hear McConnell responding to his colleagues in his familiar Kentucky drawl, but couldn’t make out the exact words he was saying.
The Kentucky senator’s office has tightly controlled the narrative about McConnell’s health for several months. After he was hospitalized in June after what McConnell said in a statement was “a bad fall,” his staff went weeks without giving his constituents any real update. In July, his team released photos with his wife, Elaine Chao, in an attempt to quiet rumors that McConnell was dead or comatose. But we still have yet to hear any audio of McConnell speaking since the day first responders found him unconscious at his Washington D.C. home three months ago. It’s virtually unheard of for a senator whose seat could decide which party controls the chamber for the next two years to be kept effectively hidden away by his own staff.
We've seen this movie before. When Woodrow Wilson suffered a massive stroke in October of 1919, his wife Edith and his doctor both hid how bad his condition was from Congress and the American public for the better part of a year. This is all while the White House kept issuing statements in his name. The American people have a right to know whether the person they elected to office to represent them can still do the job. That’s a right no individual staffers should be able to circumvent.
The so-called “reporters” who allowed a Republican senator’s staff to tell them how to do their jobs are failing at the most basic aspect of journalism. This is exactly why we need independent media that isn’t too scared to hold power accountable. Help Raw America keep doing this work for just 22 cents a day.
The Republican Party has an increasingly large racism problem, and it’s not limited to just one bad apple.
Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas recently joined several other Republicans in denouncing racist posts from Bo French, who is the Republican nominee running for Texas Railroad Commissioner. Over the weekend, French posted a photo of Brown-skinned students at a University of Texas football game to circulate the racist claim that white Americans are being replaced by immigrants at a rapid rate. He went on to suggest that the unnamed people supposedly responsible hate white Americans. French then dismissed the backlash to his post as the political establishment trying to cancel him.
French made his racism known early on. Last year, he asked his social media followers whether Jews or Muslims were a bigger threat to America. Texas Republicans decided to make him their nominee in May of this year in spite of that.
But this is happening outside of Texas, too. In Ohio, Republican Senator Jon Husted’s campaign just fired the senator’s political director after it was reported that he’d once used a photo of Nazi SS troops as his profile picture on Facebook. He also curated a playlist honoring the now-defunct nation of Rhodesia, where a white supremacist government ruled over a predominantly Black population.
Republicans all over have publicly expressed racist, bigoted and xenophobic sentiments since Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January of last year. Florida Republican Congressman Randy Fine called Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib of Michigan a “Muslim terrorist.” Texas Republican Congressman Brandon Gill told Zohran Mamdani to “go back to the Third World” in response to a video of him eating rice with his hands, as is the tradition in many countries.
Also last year, Politico obtained leaked group chats messages showing young Republicans joking about putting their opponents in gas chambers while using slurs for Black Americans. Trump himself posted an AI video to his Truth Social platform depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, said Somali immigrants in Minneapolis were “garbage,” and eventually admitted that he referred to predominantly Black countries like Haiti as “s—holes.” More recently, a campaign staffer for Georgia U.S. Senate candidate Mike Collins was found to have posted images of a swastika and even one of himself clad head-to-toe in a KKK robe.
In his post responding to French, Cornyn asked whether other Republicans will condemn racism or allow it to be normalized. He also warned that this is exactly how political parties destroy themselves from the inside. The problem for the GOP is that Trump endorses and supports candidates who aren’t shy about embracing gutter racism, which means anyone lower than Trump on the totem pole is effectively just swimming against the current.
Abraham Lincoln saw this coming in 1855, when he wrote to his friend Joshua Speed that if the Know-Nothings ever took power, the Declaration of Independence would have to be revised to say all men are created equal except Black people, immigrants, and Catholics. Lincoln watched his own Whig Party die off because it couldn't decide what it stood for, so when Cornyn warns that this is how parties destroy themselves, he's describing something that's already happened before.
Trump’s $5,000 check proposal isn’t even a week old, and yet it’s already run into a wall of opposition from members of the president’s own party.
During last week’s midterm convention in Dallas, Texas, Trump floated the idea of sending every American adult a $5,000 payment if Republicans keep their majorities in Congress this fall. But now, multiple Republican senators are pouring cold water on the idea, saying they had no advance notice of the proposal and there’s not been any actual legislation written. They’re also not excited about the hefty $1.3 trillion that economists have estimated the idea would cost.
Republican Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma said Trump’s check proposal could send inflation skyrocketing, pointing to the pandemic-era stimulus in 2020. Steve Daines of Montana said he was caught off-guard when he first heard the idea during Trump’s convention speech. Senate Majority Leader John Thune was also not willing to endorse the plan, telling reporters that anything involving that big of a price tag would have to have the approval of Congress first.
Kentucky Senator Rand Paul mocked Trump’s term of a “dividend,” saying those usually come from a company turning a profit, while the federal government is running deficits in the trillions. He insisted that Congress instead focus on cutting federal spending. Texas Senator Ted Cruz said he’s against sending anyone money who isn’t working. Susan Collins of Maine also balked at the cost of the plan.
Not every Republican is against it, but the overall vibe from Senate Republicans is overwhelmingly skeptical, particularly as 10-year Treasury yields are now pushing past 5 percent, which typically signifies looming economic disaster. Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley is also wary of diesel fuel now costing more than $6 per gallon, saying high fuel costs are doing way more damage to his state’s economy than any potential stimulus would fix.
Congress made it a federal crime more than a century ago to pay or promise anybody anything of value in exchange for their vote. While the lawyers are free to argue over whether a dividend can be defined as such if it’s only paid depending on a political party’s success, voters can see how problematic it is. Though it’s interesting that the very same Republicans who found trillions for tax cuts for the rich have suddenly rediscovered the deficit the moment a check might land in a working family's mailbox.
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Thanks to our paying subscribers, we’re able to bring you these twice-daily newsletters, original reporting from Capitol Hill and the White House and live interviews with experts offering perspectives you won’t get anywhere else. Tune in at 1 PM ET today to catch our interview with MS NOW opinion editor Zeeshan Aleem, who will discuss some of the most divisive issues Democrats are grappling with in the midterms. Watch live on our homepage at RawAmerica.com.
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