Political Heat

The United States Constitution is purportedly a sacred document to Republicans. But for as much as they claim to be in awe of or inspired by the document, GOP lawmakers were tepid in their defense of the document this past week after their party's de facto leader, Donald Trump, suggested it should be terminated to suit his ends. Last weekend, former President Donald Trump made a post on his fledgling social media site Truth Social , in which he basically stated that supposed evidence from Elon Musk on Twitter's suppression of information during the 2020 presidential election should render the results of that race invalid. Trump's solution was to run a new election or simply reinstate him into the White House — actions that he suggested required the "termination" of the Constitution. Trump wrote: A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. After huge outc...

Donald Trump's defenses against claims he did anything wrong, relating to his improperly holding classified documents — including being under investigation for potentially violating parts of the Espionage Act , per the search warrant of his Mar-a-Lago property that was made public Friday — are, to no surprise, not accurate. On his Truth Social account (where anything BUT the truth is ever uttered, it seems), Trump listed a couple of reasons why (in his mind) criticism of him harboring top secret, classified information at his Palm Beach resort (including potential info on nuclear weapons ) was fine.  Let's look at what he had to say. Number one, it was all declassified. Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Well, no, it most likely wasn't. There's a process for declassifying information as top secret as the documents Trump was harboring. Just saying "I declassified this" isn't how it works.   Additionally, according to The Wall Street Journal , the documents that wer...

A provision that's never been enforced since it was passed as part of a larger law in the way-back-times of former President Bill Clinton could land anyone talking online about abortion (in the U.S.) in prison for several years . Per The New Republic : [Q]uietly sitting on the books, where it’s been for nearly three decades, is a law that explicitly makes it a crime to discuss abortion online. TNR's Melissa Gira Grant elaborates on how this came to be, and what it could mean: The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was the first major attempt by Congress to define what would be lawful on the internet. The act includes a provision that criminalizes discussing abortion, with potential punishment of up to five years in jail, $250,000 in fines, or both. Obviously, this law is  a violation of free speech protections that exist within the First Amendment . But with Republicans all-but-guaranteed to win Congress next year , the potential for a GOP president to win in 2024, and the Su...

Republican Kelly Ruh — who served as a fake elector with nine other members of WISGOP in the state as part of a plot to upend the Electoral College and overturn the 2020 presidential election — lost to Democrat Pamela Gantz in an alder race in De Pere, Wisconsin, on Tuesday.  Gantz won with 55.7 percent of the vote , versus Ruh's 44.2 percent.  This race is small, and probably shouldn't be seen as a huge indicator of how things will go nationally. But it shouldn't be ignored, either — De Pere is a pretty evenly divided city, politically speaking, but Trump won in 2020 over Biden by 0.3 percent of the total vote . That a challenger to a Trump-supporting Republican was able to win the alder district race by more than 11 points , then, is something Democrats across the country — especially those facing Republicans who promote "big lie" election fraud conspiracy theories, or otherwise involved themselves in January 6 related events to overturn the election (hint hint...

Wisconsin's Republican Senator, Ron Johnson, is trying to win the hearts and minds of anti-vaxxers by becoming the most anti-vaxxer lawmaker in Washington — and embarrassing our state in the process. Here's the latest of what Johnson has peddled against vaccines, via Raw Story : During an interview with WCPT, Johnson said that vaccine scientists are wrong to think that they "can create something better than God." The Wisconsin Republican recalled that he had tested positive for Covid-19 last year while being free of symptoms. "Why would we just automatically assume that our natural immunity is going to be awful?" he ranted. "You would think the default position would be, if you've already had it, you ought to be pretty well protected. Why do we assume that the body's natural immune system isn't the marvel that it really is?" "Why do we think that we can create something better than God" is quite the argument for Johnson to mak...