Tag: Pennsylvania

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High Pennsylvania Republican Vows to Assessment 2020 Election Outcomes

Top Pennsylvania Republican Vows to Review 2020 Election Results

The top Republican in the Pennsylvania State Senate promised this week to carry out a broad review of the 2020 election results, a move that comes as G.O.P. lawmakers continue to sow doubts about the contest’s legitimacy by pushing to re-examine votes in battleground states like Arizona.

State Senator Jake Corman, who serves as president pro tempore of the G.O.P.-controlled chamber, made the comments in an interview with a right-wing radio host, and they were first reported by The Philadelphia Inquirer on Tuesday. His remarks were the strongest sign yet that Pennsylvania — which President Biden won by more than 80,000 votes — may press forward with a review of 2020 results, despite no evidence of voter fraud that would have affected the outcome.

In the interview, Mr. Corman said that he wanted to begin “almost immediately” and that hearings would begin this week. He added that he expected to use the full power of the state’s General Assembly, including subpoenas, to conduct the review, which he referred to as a “forensic investigation.”

“We can bring people in, we can put them under oath, we can subpoena records, and that’s what we need to do and that’s what we’re going to do,” Mr. Corman said. “And so we’re going to move forward.”

Previously, State Senator Doug Mastriano, a Republican and vocal proponent of former President Donald J. Trump’s falsehoods about the election, had called for a review of results in three counties.

Until recently the chair of the Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee, he sent letters requesting ballots, records and machines from Philadelphia County, which encompasses the state’s largest city and which Mr. Biden won with over 80 percent of the vote; York County, south of Harrisburg, which Mr. Trump won handily; and Tioga County, in the northern part of the state, which Mr. Trump also carried with ease. All three counties refused to comply, and Mr. Mastriano’s legal authority to enforce the requests remains unclear.

Last week, Mr. Corman removed Mr. Mastriano from his position as chair of the committee and installed State Senator Cris Dush, also a Republican, to lead the panel and oversee the review.

In the interview, Mr. Corman expressed his own doubts about the election.

“I don’t necessarily have faith in the results,” he said. “I think that there were many problems in our election that we need to get to the bottom of.”

Mr. Corman’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Veronica Degraffenreid, who as the acting secretary of the commonwealth oversees Pennsylvania’s elections, has discouraged counties from participating in any election reviews, noting that any inspection of voting machines by uncredentialed third parties would result in their decertification, and that counties would have to bear the considerable costs of replacing the equipment.

“The Department of State encourages counties to refuse to participate in any sham review of past elections that would require counties to violate the trust of their voters and ignore their statutory duty to protect the chain of custody of their ballots and voting equipment,” Ms. Degraffenreid’s office said in a statement last month.

It remains unclear exactly how Mr. Corman and the Pennsylvania Senate will proceed with their review, including what they might seek in terms of equipment and records, and which counties they might focus on. Mr. Corman did say that, after talking with fellow legislators in Arizona, he was looking for a “neutral arbiter” to help carry out the review — a potential nod to how the Maricopa County review became widely ridiculed in part because the chief executive of the company carrying out the re-examination had promoted conspiracy theories about rigged voting machines costing Mr. Trump victory in the state.

“I think it’s important that we get people involved that don’t have ties to anybody, that are professional, that will do the job so that we can stand behind the results,” Mr. Corman said.

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Politics

Conor Lamb Enters 2022 Pennsylvania Senate Race

Conor Lamb Enters 2022 Pennsylvania Senate Race

PITTSBURGH – Rep. Conor Lamb believes he knows what it takes for Democrats to win in Pennsylvania nationwide.

He looks at President Biden, whose narrow victory in the state – named four days after Election Day – got him over the top and into the White House.

“People will use the word moderate,” Lamb said Thursday at his home in Pittsburgh’s South Hills. “We are a swing state. I don’t think we’re ideologically too advanced either way. ”

On Friday, at a union hall on Hot Metal Street in Pittsburgh, Mr. Lamb announced his long-awaited entry into the 2022 Pennsylvania Senate race, vowing to “fight for every single vote in our state on every single square inch of ground” and presenting himself as a middle class enough to be elected nationwide.

The question is whether he’s liberal enough to win the Democratic primary.

A Navy veteran and former prosecutor, Mr. Lamb, 37, is likely the last major candidate to step into what is expected to be major competitive battles in both parties for the seat of Senator Pat Toomey, a retiring Republican.

It is the only vacant Republican-owned seat in a state that Mr Biden has held, and the Democrats see this as their best opportunity to expand their pinpoint control of the Senate, in which the 50-50 partisan split has Vice President Kamala Harris with the cast leaves decisive votes. A single extra seat would mean a simple Democratic majority in the Senate and at least shield the White House a little from the whims of individual senators who are now a huge influence, like moderates Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.

Mr Lamb became famous in 2018 when he won a special election to the House of Representatives in a district that Mr Trump had run in double digits. He won twice more in a redrawn but still politically mixed district, staking out independent positions, including voting against MP Nancy Pelosi for Speaker of the House. But while he calls himself the strongest potential Democratic candidate precisely because of his two-sided, centrist approach, aspects of his record, including guns and marijuana, are not up to par with many primary voters.

“Progressives are the most active in the party and that makes it difficult for Lamb,” said Brendan McPhillips, who led Mr Biden’s 2020 Pennsylvania campaign and does not work for a Senate candidate.

The progressives’ early favorite and alleged front runner for the Democratic nomination is Lt. Gov. Something of a folk hero on the national left, John Fetterman, with roughly 400,000 Twitter followers, who enjoy his posts in favor of “legal weed” and his frequent beatings on Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema for not “voting like Democrats”.

As the 14-year-old mayor of Braddock, a poor community outside of Pittsburgh, Mr. Fetterman tattooed the dates of the local murders on his arm. As lieutenant governor, he fought to pardon longtime prisoners of conscience.

Known for a casual work wardrobe of unlocked craftsman shirts and jeans or even shorts, and for his imposing presence – he’s six feet tall and has a shaved head – Mr. Fetterman, 51, hopes to appeal to some working-class white voters who float over to Support Mr Trump. He has outperformed the fundraising field, raising $ 6.5 million this year.

Still, Mr Fetterman’s challenge is the downside of Mr Lamb’s: He could win the May primary but be seen as too liberal for Pennsylvania general election voters. “He’s the candidate many Republicans would like to face,” said Jessica Taylor, an analyst for the bipartisan Cook Political Report.

In an incident in 2013 when he was Mayor of Braddock, Mr. Fetterman faced potential liability in the primary. After hearing what he thought were gunshots, Mr. Fetterman stopped a black jogger and held it at gunpoint until the police arrived. The man was found unarmed and was released. Bringing on the episode in February, Mr Fetterman said he made “split-second decisions” when he believed a nearby school might be at risk.

However, with police and vigilante violence against black men a high profile issue for Democratic voters, some party officials and strategists have expressed fears that if nominated, Mr Fetterman could lower black voter turnout. An outside group supporting the election of black candidates has already run a radio ad in Philadelphia attacking Mr. Fetterman over the incident.

“It’s definitely a problem,” said Christopher Borick, a political scientist and pollster at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. “It hasn’t disappeared and keeps reappearing. It hoists red flags. “

In a statement, Mr Fetterman’s campaign stated that four months after the incident in Braddock, an 80 percent black town, he was “overwhelmingly re-elected” because voters “know John and know this had nothing ”. to do with race. ”It added that he“ ran and won across the country, and he is the only candidate running for this Senate seat to have done so ”.

If Democratic voters resist Mr. Fetterman and Mr. Lamb, a path could open up for alternative candidates, including Val Arkoosh, a district official in the electoral suburbs of Philadelphia and the only woman in the race, and Malcolm Kenyatta, a telegenic youngster State legislature from North Philadelphia.

Mr Kenyatta, who would be the state’s first black and first openly gay Senate candidate if he won the election, has traveled extensively seeking local support but lags behind his rivals in fundraising.

Ms. Arkoosh, a medical doctor and chairman of the Board of Commissioners in Montgomery County, the state’s third largest county, has endorsement of Emily’s list of Democratic women who support abortion rights.

Together, Mr. Fetterman, Mr. Lamb, and Mrs. Arkoosh outperformed their Republican counterparts for the quarter ended June.

While Democrats see a model in Mr Biden’s 81,000-vote win last year in the state that swept suburban swing voters horrified by Mr Trump, Republicans are currently playing and narrating almost entirely against grassroots Make America Great Again the fable of a stolen election 2020.

There is a proven road to statewide victories for Republicans in Pennsylvania that was embarked on last year by two GOP nominees who were elected treasurer and auditor. They did so by running before Mr Trump in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, where many higher educated voters had traditionally supported Republicans but were repulsed by the harassing, divisive former president.

Mr. Toomey, the outgoing Republican senator, recently warned: “Candidates must run on ideas and principles, not on loyalty to a man.”

But few of the Republicans fighting to succeed him seem to have listened.

Sean Parnell, a former Army Ranger who lost a house race to Mr. Lamb last year, sued every 2.6 million Pennsylvania Mail-In votes, a case that was rejected by the US Supreme Court, and said he support an Arizona-style review of the 2020 Pennsylvania ballot papers. Donald Trump Jr. supported his Senate bid.

And Jeff Bartos, a Philadelphia area real estate developer and large party donor who was expected to appeal to voters in the suburbs, has similarly courted the Trump base and a “full forensic examination” of the Pennsylvania elections demanded, although several courts have denied lawsuits alleging fraud or administrative misconduct.

Neither Mr. Parnell nor Mr. Bartos raised as much cash last quarter as Dark Horse candidate Kathy Barnette, a former finance manager who lost a race in Congress on Philadelphia’s main line last year. Ms. Barnette has charged far-right cable channels Newsmax and OAN with election fraud.

A longtime Republican adviser to the state, Christopher Nicholas, said there are three lanes of travel available to GOP candidates: “Super MAGA-Trumpy, Trump-adjacent and not so much-Trump.”

Lately, he said, almost everyone has pushed themselves into the “super-MAGA-Trumpy” lane.

“As a Republican, you have to be careful how far to the right you go to win the primary so you don’t get irreparable harm in the general election,” said Nicholas.

Mr Lamb faces a similar challenge to a moderate in the Democratic primary.

He is sure to be hit hard by some previous positions, including his opposition to a ban on assault weapons in 2019 and his vote last year to permanently extend the Trump administration’s individual tax cuts.

More recently, Mr. Lamb has kept pace with his party: in April he supported Mr. Biden’s demand to ban the sale of future offensive weapons; in May he advocated the end of filibuster.

Mr Lamb said in an interview that the attack on the Capitol was a turning point for him, particularly in how Republican leaders came to accept Mr Trump’s false accusation that the 2020 vote had been rigged.

He alluded to this again in his announcement on Friday: “If you take such a big lie and put it at the center of the party,” he said of the GOP leaders, “you can’t expect them to talk about anything else Tell the truth”. . “

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Biden Visits Pennsylvania to Promote Infrastructure Plan

Biden Visits Pennsylvania to Promote Infrastructure Plan

President Biden traveled to Lehigh Valley, Pa., to bolster support for his infrastructure package on the day of a critical breakthrough with Republicans on the Hill, who said they had resolved the biggest sticking points to a final agreement on a far-reaching infrastructure plan, and planned to vote to allow the package to advance.

After touring a plant that produces Mack trucks, Mr. Biden underscored the importance of American manufacturing and unveiled a new proposal to support domestic production by increasing the amount of U.S.-made products purchased by the federal government.

“In recent years, ‘Buy America’ has become a hollow promise,” Mr. Biden said. “My administration is going to make ‘Buy America’ a reality, and I’m putting the weight of the federal government behind that commitment.”

Standing in front of two Mack trucks and an oversized American flag, Mr. Biden said he was making the biggest enforcement changes in the “Buy America” law in 70 years, with the goal of funneling tens of billions of dollars into jobs in communities like Allentown.

The federal government procures about $600 billion of goods a year, including everything from helicopter blades to office furniture, according to the Office of Management and Budget. Mr. Biden announced on Wednesday that he was changing the “Buy American” rules related to purchases made with taxpayer dollars. The plan is to increase the percentage of component parts that need to be manufactured domestically from 55 percent to 60 percent, with a graduated increase to 75 percent.

“55 percent is not high enough,” Mr. Biden said, referring to the domestic content of products provided by contractors. “We got a new sheriff in town.”

He added: “if American companies know we’re going to be buying from them, they’re going to be more inclined to hire and make key investments in the future in their companies.”

Mr. Biden’s efforts to promote the economy and his infrastructure plan, however, came alongside concerning new data about the spread of the highly infectious Delta variant, and the possibility of variants to come. Anxiety about the pandemic has begun to rise again, and Mr. Biden was expected to announce on Thursday that civilian federal workers will be required to get vaccinated or get weekly tests.

Wearing a mask for part of his trip, Mr. Biden brushed aside reporters’ questions about the possibility of imposing vaccination requirements.

On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called for universal masking in schools and told vaccinated Americans that they should begin wearing masks again in the many counties in the country where the virus is surging. At the same time, officials in Congress and the White House reinstituted indoor mask requirements for staff to counter the surge.

The return to masking in the West Wing came just over two months after Mr. Biden and senior officials shed their face masks, in the biggest sign of a triumphant return toward normalcy since he took office.

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Supreme Courtroom guidelines for Pennsylvania cheerleader in class free speech case

Supreme Court rules for Pennsylvania cheerleader in school free speech case

Microphones placed in front of the US Supreme Court building in Washington, DC, the United States, on Tuesday, November 10, 2020.

Stefani Reynolds | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that a Pennsylvania high school violated the First Amendment rights of a cheerleader by punishing her for using vulgar language criticized on social media by the school.

The 8-1 statement upheld the lower court rulings against Mahanoy Area High School’s decision to suspend then-student Brandi Levy from her junior cheerleading roster for a year via two Snapchat posts she sent off-school .

The judges had weighed whether a 1969 Supreme Court ruling that gave public schools the ability to regulate certain idioms was applicable to a case where the speech was off campus.

In its ruling on Wednesday, the Supreme Court said, “Courts must be more skeptical of a school’s efforts to regulate off-campus language as it may mean the student cannot make this type of speech at all.”

“The school itself has an interest in protecting a student’s unpopular expression, especially when the expression is off-campus,” because “America’s public schools are the kindergartens of democracy,” wrote Judge Stephen Breyer, who wrote the majority opinion.

Judge Clarence Thomas, who turned 73 on Wednesday, disagreed.

Levy said in a statement, “The school has gone too far and I’m glad the Supreme Court approves.”

“I was frustrated, I was 14 years old and I expressed my frustration the way teenagers do today. Young people need the ability to express themselves without worrying about being punished in school,” said Levy.

“I never imagined that a simple snap would turn into a Supreme Court case, but I’m proud that my family and I stood up for the rights of millions of public school students.”

Brandi Levy, a former cheerleader at Mahanoy Area High School in Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania, poses in an undated photo taken by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Danna Singer / ACLU | REUTER’S METHOD

Levy, whose name was abbreviated to “BL” in court records, did not make it into her school’s cheerleading team as a high school student in May 2017, but instead won a place on the junior college roster.

While at a Cocoa Hut convenience store, she posted two messages on Snapchat to vent her frustration at missing out on college and not getting the position she’d been on the softball team the school wanted.

“F — school f — softball f — cheer f — everything,” she wrote in the first snap, which showed a picture of Levy and a friend with their middle fingers raised.

The second picture had a caption that read, “Love, like me and [another student] I am told that we need a year jv before we go to college, but that is[t] doesn’t matter to others? “This post also featured an upside-down smiley face emoji.

The news was reported to the cheerleading coaches and principal at Mahanoy City School, who found they had broken the rules and suspended Levy from the squad for the coming year.

The Supreme Court’s opinion found that the 3rd District Court of Appeal had ruled in favor of Levy on the grounds that the 1969 decision – Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District – “did not apply because schools did not have a special license to regulate student speaking off campus. “

But the Supreme Court on Wednesday disagreed with that view.

Instead, it noted that “Although public schools may have a particular interest in regulating some students’ off-campus speech, the particular interests offered by the school are insufficient to reflect BL’s interest in freedom of expression in this case overcome.”

Breyer wrote that there were three characteristics of the language of off-campus students that influenced a school’s ability to regulate it, as opposed to on-campus language.

The first characteristic, according to the court, is that a school is rarely “in loco parentis” – instead of the parents – when a student is off campus.

Its second characteristic is that schools have a “heavy burden” justifying off-campus language rules, otherwise they would be technically able to intervene in what a student is saying throughout the 24-hour day.

The third characteristic, wrote Breyer, is that schools, as “kindergartens of democracy”, should have an interest in protecting unpopular expressions of opinion, “especially when the expression of opinion takes place off-campus.”

David Cole, the American Civil Liberties Union legal director who campaigned in the Supreme Court on Levy’s case, said, “Protecting the freedom of young people to speak outside of school is vital, and this is a great victory for the freedom of speech Millions of students attending our country’s public schools. “

“The school has asked the court in this case to punish speech that it considers ‘disruptive’ regardless of where it occurs,” said Cole in a statement. “If the court had accepted this argument, it would have jeopardized all manner of speech by young people, including what they said about politics, school operations and general teenage frustrations.”

“The message of this judgment is clear – freedom of speech is for everyone, and that includes public school students,” said Cole.

But Thomas, in his solitary disagreement, wrote that “the majority fail to consider whether schools will often have more, not less, authority to discipline students who broadcast language on social media.”

Thomas explained that since language spoken on social media can be seen and shared on campus, “there is often a greater tendency to harm the school environment than face-to-face conversation off campus.”

He also wrote that the majority could not explain why they were breaking a previous rule that schools can regulate language off campus “as long as it tends to harm the school, its faculty or students, or its programs”.

The “basis” of majority decision-making is independent of anything stable, “wrote Thomas,” and courts (and schools) will almost certainly not know what exactly the opinion of the court means today. “

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Health

Pennsylvania and L.A. Transfer Up Dates for Vaccine Eligibility

Pennsylvania and L.A. Move Up Dates for Vaccine Eligibility

The state of Pennsylvania and the city of Los Angeles this week accelerate their plans for broader approval of Covid-19 vaccines as the U.S. nears universal approval for adults.

Most states and US territories have already extended access to those over the age of 16. Others, including Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oregon, and Washington state, have plans for universal adult access in the next few days. All states are expected to be there by Monday, a deadline set by President Biden.

Some states have local eligibility differences, including Illinois, where Chicago didn’t join a statewide expansion that began Monday.

California as a whole has set Thursday as the date, but Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said Sunday that all residents 16 and over in his city, the second largest in the country, would be eligible two days earlier. In Pennsylvania, Governor Tom Wolf said Monday that all adults there would be eligible on Tuesday, six days earlier than previously planned.

“We need to further accelerate the introduction of the vaccine, especially as the number of cases and hospitalization rates have increased,” Wolf said in a statement.

The extended authorization did not always bring immediate access. The demand for vaccinations continues to outpace supply in much of the country, and people are striving to book tight appointments as soon as they become available. And the supply of Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose vaccine will be extremely limited until federal regulators approve production at a Baltimore manufacturing facility with a pattern of quality control errors, the White House pandemic response coordinator said Friday.

“We ask for your patience as we continue to expand our operations, receive more doses, and enter this new phase of our campaign to end the pandemic,” Garcetti said.

More than 119 million people – or more than a third of the US population – have now received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The nation administers an average of 3 million doses per day.

Two of the three vaccines approved for use in the United States – those made by Moderna and Johnson & Johnson – are approved for use in adults. The third from Pfizer-BioNTech is approved for use by people aged 16 and over. The company would like to expand this area to young people between the ages of 12 and 15. No vaccine has yet been approved for use in younger children.

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Pennsylvania G.O.P.’s Push for Extra Energy Over Judiciary Raises Alarms

Pennsylvania G.O.P.’s Push for More Power Over Judiciary Raises Alarms

She added: “It is far too much control for one branch to have another branch, especially when one of its jobs is to rule in the excesses of the legislature.”

If the Republican bill becomes law, Pennsylvania would be only the fifth state in the country, after Louisiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Illinois, to map its judicial system entirely to constituencies, according to the Brennan Center. And other states could soon join Pennsylvania in trying to redesign the courts through redistribution.

Republicans in the Texan legislature, also controlled by the GOP, recently introduced a bill to move districts for the state appeals courts by moving some districts to different districts, causing an uproar among the State Democrats who are the new districts see as a weakening of the vote The power of the black and Latin American communities in judicial elections and possibly the Republican bias of the Texas courts.

Gilberto Hinojosa, leader of the Texas Democratic Party, called the bill “a mere takeover to prevent blacks and Latinos from influencing the courts as their numbers in the state grow”.

These judicial restructuring struggles take shape as Republican-controlled lawmakers across the country investigate new election restrictions after the 2020 elections. In Georgia, Republicans are looking in the state assembly for a number of new laws that would make voting more difficult, including a drop box ban and extensive postal voting restrictions. Similar bills in Arizona would restrict postal voting, including the state’s ban on sending postal voting requests. And in Texas, Republican lawmakers want to limit early voting periods.

The Republican nationwide effort follows a successful four-year initiative by the Party’s Washington lawmakers to reshape federal justice with Conservative judges. Led by Senator Mitch McConnell, until recently the majority leader, and Mr. Trump, the Senate confirmed 231 federal judges and three new Supreme Court justices during the former president’s four-year tenure, according to Russell Wheeler. a research fellow at the Brookings Institution.

In a state like Pennsylvania, which has two densely populated Democratic cities and large rural areas, this could lead to an oversized representation of sparsely populated places that are more conservative, especially if lawmakers resort to a gerrymandering tactic used in Pennsylvania’s 2011 resembles.