Tag: victory

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Politics

Texas Home Passes Voting Invoice as G.O.P. Nears a Onerous-Fought Victory

Texas House Passes Voting Bill as G.O.P. Nears a Hard-Fought Victory

The House’s vote on Friday most likely signaled the end of drama that began in late May when, in the closing hours of the Texas Legislature’s regular session, Democratic House members fled the chamber to stop Republicans from passing a similar bill.

An irate Mr. Abbott called a special session to begin in early July, urging legislators to consider a voting bill along with proposals to direct more money toward border security, restrict transgender youths’ participation in interscholastic athletics and limit access to abortion, among other conservative priorities. More than 50 House Democrats, led by their progressive wing, organized two charter flights from Austin to Washington, where they were initially greeted as heroes by congressional Democrats in their shared fight to enact new federal voting protections.

Their momentum was short-lived.

In the days after their arrival, groups of Texas House Democrats met with Vice President Kamala Harris and Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a key vote in the push to pass Democrats’ federal voting bills. But before their first week in the capital had ended, several of the Texas lawmakers tested positive for the coronavirus, turning their planned media tour and congressional pressure campaign into a series of videoconferences that failed to attract much attention.

They remained ensconced at a hotel in downtown Washington, unable to use the swimming pool because Republicans had stationed a videographer on the deck waiting to film any of them appearing to violate their pledge to work tirelessly for voting rights.

In the hours after the July special session ended, Mr. Abbott called a second one to begin two days later. But the potential arrests of Democrats who failed to appear in the statehouse chamber, promised by Mr. Abbott and State House Republican leaders, failed to materialize. By then, the Democrats had quietly returned to the state, with many going about their daily lives without incident.

By the end of last week, a trickle of State House Democrats began returning to the State Capitol, ending the walkout and allowing the business of the chamber to resume. While Texas Democrats celebrated their fight against new voting restrictions, Republicans moved swiftly to enact their proposals.

For all of the energy Democrats poured into their flight from Austin and attempts to pressure Congress, the scene inside the Texas State House chamber on Thursday and Friday was largely one of an ordinary day of legislating, devoid of fireworks or protesters in the gallery. Only a somewhat greater number of television cameras hinted at the stakes of the vote.

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World News

Taliban Seize Zaranj, an Afghanistan Provincial Capital, in a Symbolic Victory

Taliban Capture Zaranj, an Afghanistan Provincial Capital, in a Symbolic Victory

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Taliban captured a regional hub city in western Afghanistan on Friday, officials said, the first provincial capital to fall to the insurgency since the Biden administration announced the full withdrawal of U.S. troops.

The successful takeover marks a significant milestone in the insurgents’ relentless march to increase their stranglehold on the Afghan government and retake power in the country. The Taliban have besieged a host of such cities for weeks, and the fall of Zaranj, the provincial capital of Nimruz Province on the Afghanistan-Iran border, is the Taliban’s first breakthrough. And it handed the insurgents another crucial international border crossing, the latest in its recent campaign to control road access in Afghanistan.

A regional administrative hub is now completely controlled by the Taliban, an attention-grabbing addition to their steady drumbeat of rural victories in recent months. It was a considerable setback for the government, which has had to contend with simultaneous attacks on capital cities that have stretched military resources desperately thin.

The collapse of Zaranj at the hands of the insurgents was confirmed Friday by Rohgul Khairzad, the deputy governor of Nimruz, and Hajji Baz Mohammad Naser, the head of the provincial council.

“All the people are hiding in their houses in fear of the Taliban,” said Khair-ul-Nisa Ghami, a member of the provincial council. “The situation is very worrying. People are scared,” she said, adding: “The Taliban captured the city without any fighting.”

The collapse of Zaranj, a city of 160,000 people, occurred on the same day that a senior government official was assassinated in Kabul, the capital. It also came as the insurgents pressed hard into other provincial cities, in a day of bleak news for the government.

Situated in the remote southwestern corner of the country, Zaranj has long been considered a lawless border town, acting as Afghanistan’s main hub for illegal migration, replete with an illicit economy focused on drug trafficking and fuel. For decades, a steady flow of Afghans displaced by conflict and poverty have flocked to the city’s smuggler-owned hotels in order to broker deals to cross into Iran.

“Nimruz is a place where business interests and criminal networks govern the province,” said Ashley Jackson, a researcher with the Overseas Development Institute, adding that a Taliban takeover that disrupted those business interests “would not have been possible.”

Taliban fighters faced little resistance in taking Zaranj, said Afghan officials who were not authorized to speak to the news media. They said a deal had been negotiated with the Taliban allowing the authorities in the city to flee across the border to Iran with their families.

The flight of provincial authorities began on Thursday night when the neighboring district of Kang fell, according to the officials. They said people had started looting local government offices and businesses in the city until around 2 p.m. Friday when the Taliban arrived.

Only the local office of the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, put up a fight, but eventually surrendered, the officials said. One of the Taliban’s first acts after entering the city was to break into its prison, immediately filling Zaranj’s streets with liberated inmates, they added.

Later in the day, Afghan Air Force aircraft circled above the city, dropping strikes on the headquarters of the police and the border brigade, the officials said.

Mr. Naser, the provincial council head, said that the government had failed to send reinforcements to Zaranj, and that officials had decided to abandon the city in order to avoid casualties. He denied that a deal had been struck with the Taliban.

Since the Taliban began its military campaign in May, the city has buzzed with people looking to leave the country. In early July, around 450 pickup trucks carrying migrants snaked from Zaranj toward crossing points along the Iranian border each day — more than double the number of cars that made the trip in March, according to David Mansfield, a migration researcher with the Overseas Development Institute.

The seizure of Zaranj is a symbolically significant development in the Taliban’s campaign, as they have moved away from targeting rural districts to focus on attacking provincial capitals.

The 215th Corps of the Afghan National Army is responsible for security in both Zaranj and Lashkar Gah, the capital of neighboring Helmand Province, which has been under siege for several days. The 215th Corps’ leadership had shifted its focus to defending Lashkar Gah, leaving Zaranj vulnerable to capture.

The Taliban also took responsibility for the assassination on Friday of a senior government official in Kabul. Dawa Khan Meenapal, the head of the government’s media and information center, was gunned down in a targeted attack. Dozens of officials and civil society figures have been assassinated over the past year, though the Taliban have largely denied responsibility for those attacks.

The killing came days after a coordinated attack by the insurgent group on the residence of the acting defense minister that left eight people dead. That assault highlighted the Taliban’s ability to strike in the heart of the Afghan capital as they continue their sweeping military campaign.

In northern Afghanistan on Friday, the Taliban attacked another provincial capital, Sheberghan, from five directions, burning houses and wedding halls, and assaulting the police headquarters and the prison. There were numerous civilian casualties, said Halima Sadaf Karimi, a member of Parliament from Jowzjan Province, of which Sheberghan is the capital.

Fighting also continued around the major western city of Herat, in Kandahar city in the south and in other provincial capitals.

The government’s response to the insurgents’ recent victories has been piecemeal. Afghan forces have retaken some districts, but both the Afghan Air Force and its commando forces — which have been deployed to hold what territory remains as regular army and police units retreat, surrender or refuse to fight — are exhausted.

In the security forces’ stead, the government has once more looked to local militias to fill the gaps, a move reminiscent of the chaotic and ethnically divided civil war of the 1990s that many Afghans now fear will return.

In recent weeks, the U.S. military has increased airstrikes on Taliban positions around crucial cities in an effort to give Afghan forces on the ground time to regroup. The strikes alone do little to change the situation on the ground, but have slowed Taliban advances.

The United States is supposed to complete its withdrawal by Aug. 31, at which point the Biden administration has said its military operations will end. That would give the Afghan government mere weeks to reconstitute its security forces to defend the cities and territory still under its control.

At a special session of the United Nations Security Council on Friday, Deborah Lyons, the special representative of the U.N. secretary-general for Afghanistan, warned that without action, the country could descend “into a situation of catastrophe so serious that it would have few, if any, parallels in this century.”

Afghanistan, she said, had come to resemble the battlefields of Syria and Sarajevo, with the Taliban making a “strategic decision” to attack urban areas, causing hundreds of deaths among civilians in just the last few weeks. The fighting, she said, comes on top of a punishing drought that has left 18.5 million people in need of humanitarian aid.

She added: “As one Afghan put it to us recently, ‘We are no longer talking about preserving the progress and the rights we have gained, we are talking about mere survival.’”

Reporting was contributed by Christina Goldbaum, Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Michael Schwirtz.

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Business

Macy’s retailer workers rating victory in difficult self-checkout

Macy's store employees score victory in challenging self-checkout

People wear face masks as they walk through Herald Square in New York City on January 8, 2021.

Angela Weiss | AFP | Getty Images

When Macy’s introduced a new self-checkout feature on its mobile app in 2018, the department store pointed out how customers could browse stores but skip the hassle at the checkout. For some business partners, however, this triggered alarm bells – and feared that this would jeopardize their jobs or dock their pay.

Three years later, a union representing Macy’s employees won a victory in questioning the technology-based approach and determining how it cuts them out of commissions. An independent arbitrator ruled last week that Macy’s had breached its collective bargaining agreement, saying the company must exclude commission-paid departments like men’s suits and cosmetics from self-checkout.

The complaint was filed by approximately 600 employees in six stores in the Boston and Rhode Island area that are part of the United Food and Commercial Workers. UFCW represents 1.3 million workers, including over 11,000 Macy’s workers in major cities such as Seattle, San Francisco and New York City.

The labor dispute highlights the tension between technology and retail workers. For years, retailers, from department stores to large grocers, have tried to keep up as online giant Amazon and ecommerce brands that go direct to consumers stole market share.

Amazon has made technology a key feature as it expands its own stationary footprint. In the convenience stores called Amazon Go, high-tech camera systems are used that automate the check-out. This speeds up payments for customers and eliminates the need for cashiers. It is believed that this technology will be rolled out in at least some of its large Amazon Fresh grocery stores. In addition, the palm scanning payment system is also being rolled out to Whole Foods stores.

With the pandemic, the debate has come back to the fore. Consumers have downloaded apps and introduced new modes of shopping like roadside pickup to limit business travel and social distance during the health crisis. Along the way, buyers have learned to love the added convenience these services provide. This is an additional urgency for retailers to adapt their digital options, supply chain and workforce to keep up with consumer preferences.

For example, contactless payments have become mainstream, according to Mastercard. It found that 41% of in-person transactions worldwide in the third quarter of 2020 were contactless, up from 37% in the second quarter and 30% last year.

Stay competitive

Santiago Gallino, a professor at Wharton School who specializes in digital transformation, said retailers in particular are under pressure to “reinvent themselves and rethink the role of employees” or face extinction. The industry is littered with warning messages, from RadioShack to Toys R Us.

Macy’s does not want to join this list. It has struggled with years of decline in sales. Sales decreased for three consecutive years from 2015 to 2017. Sales fell again in 2019. The pandemic exacerbated the challenge with stores temporarily closing and annual sales falling about 28%.

In the arbitration, Macy’s said the technology “is needed to stay competitive in an ever-changing retail market”.

While Macy’s refused to comment on the outcome of the arbitration, the ruling will have no immediate effect on customers.

The company expanded the self-checkout function (Scan and Pay) to all 500 or so Macy’s stores in 2018. Customers could scan barcodes on items with their cell phones and apply vouchers or loyalty program discounts themselves, but had to receive security labels from an employee. The function excluded some departments, e.g. B. Items with large tickets such as mattresses and fine jewelry.

Macy’s took the feature offline in October due to technical improvements and has no schedule for when it will be brought back, company spokeswoman Blair Rosenberg said. It would not be available in stores under arbitration.

However, Macy executives have announced that they will be focusing their investments on digital business. At a virtual conference hosted by Goldman Sachs in September, Felicia Williams, Macy’s interim chief financial officer, said using technology – including self-checkout – to improve the customer experience is a priority.

As retailers adapt to stay relevant, Wharton Gallino executives have to strike a delicate balance: adding technology that customers want and emphasizing the importance of employees even as their job descriptions change.

“When it comes to manpower and hourly reductions, the response from these salespeople is no surprise,” he said. “But if the retailer explains the changes the industry is going through and how the employees are adding value in this environment, then I would hope that both the employees and management can get to a better place.”

He said commissions have gotten harder in a digital world too. In the past, retailers used pay to fuel employee efforts on the sales floor, from picking up customers of other sizes to recommending goods. The payout was made for the sales rep when he checked out a customer.

Increasingly, however, customers come to a store to try on a pair of shoes, rummage through aisles or ask questions – only to later buy the item online. This can make it harder to keep track of the employee’s role in that sale, even if they were instrumental in influencing that sale, he said.

“The cause-and-effect link isn’t that clear,” he said. “The moment that connection is broken, my sales rep may lose the incentive to be helpful and pay attention to a customer’s needs.”

With stores serving more than showrooms, retailers need to think about new ways to motivate strong customer service.

‘Just the beginning’

As part of the ruling, Macy’s will have to make a repayment that employees at those six stores with total sales of approximately $ 2,000 would have made through scanning and paying.

Fernando Lemus, who represents the workers who filed the complaint as president of UFCW 1445, said the self-checkout feature triggered a small number of sales in stores. Even so, he said, employees want to make sure that changing responsibilities doesn’t lead to a cut in wages.

“As technology advances in this industry, we were concerned that this was just the beginning,” he said.

Over the past five years, he said, Macy’s employees in his local union have declined by about 33% as the retailer cuts its workforce – and some who still work in stores have taken on jobs like fulfilling online orders.

For Terri Barkett, who works at the Macy’s store in Warwick, Rhode Island, the umpire’s decision was a relief. Unlike some of her colleagues, she said her wages are not based on commissions. But she said she feared scanning and paying could ultimately result in deals with few, if any, cashiers.

Barkett has been with Macy’s for 19 years. She loves to help customers find the perfect birthday present or outfits for special occasions – and often looks high and low for the right color, style, or size. She believes the human connection is one of the retailer’s most powerful tools to deepen loyalty and generate higher sales.

Just this week, she said, she checked out a customer and noticed the Tommy Bahama logo on his shirt. She told him the brand was for sale and pointed to the display.

“He ran over there in a moment. He has two more [shirts]”, she said.” An app can’t see that. “

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Politics

Trump pressures Georgia high election official to ‘discover’ votes and overturn Biden victory

Trump pressures Georgia top election official to 'find' votes and overturn Biden victory

In an exceptional phone call this weekend, President Donald Trump pressured Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the state by finding votes to shift the number in his favor, as received by NBC News.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger resisted pressure from Trump to change Georgia’s election results, even as the president made veiled threats of possible prosecution if denied. The call was made on Saturday.

Trump, who refused to allow the election, said during the call that he wanted to “find 11,780 votes” to change the outcome in Georgia.

He told Raffensperger, a Republican, that Georgia’s vote had dropped hundreds of thousands of votes and suggested that the Secretary of State announce that he had recalculated the numbers to show a Trump victory.

“Well, Mr. President, the challenge you have is the data you have is wrong,” Raffensberger replied, according to the record.

Raffensperger and the secretary’s general counsel, Attorney Ryan Germany, also pushed back on Trump’s claims that ballot papers had been destroyed or that Dominion had removed parts of voting machines in Georgia that were showing more Republican votes.

The contents of the phone call were first reported by the Washington Post.

Trump, referring to Saturday’s call in a tweet on Sunday morning, said Raffensperger could not answer his questions about alleged election fraud, saying, “He has no idea.” Raffensperger replied on Twitter, writing, “What you say is not true. The truth will come out.”

Bob Bauer, a senior adviser to President-elect Biden, slammed Trump’s actions in a statement on Sunday.

“We now have irrefutable evidence that a president is putting an official of his own party under pressure and threatening to induce him to overturn the legal, certified number of votes of one state and fabricate another in his place,” said Bauer. “It captures the whole, nefarious story of Donald Trump’s attack on American democracy.”

The Senate Minority Whip, Dick Durbin, D-IL, said in a statement that the call warranted a criminal investigation.

“President Trump’s taped conversation with Georgian Foreign Minister Raffensperger is more than a pathetic, rambling, delusional abuse. His shameful effort to intimidate an elected official into deliberately changing and misrepresenting the statutory votes in his state strikes in the heart of our democracy and deserves nothing less than a criminal investigation, “the statement said.

House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., Condemned Trump’s actions as a “despicable abuse of power” that may be incontestable.

“If it is potentially criminal, it may be incontestable. And even if there is no crime, it may be punishable,” Schiff told reporters on Sunday.

Justin Levitt, an expert on suffrage and a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who was a former Justice Department official, believes Trump’s behavior in calling would be in violation of several laws if a prosecutor could prove the president did so white weren’t really thousands of countless ballots that would turn the election around.

These criminal violations could include a conspiracy to violate a federal electoral law that has been used in the past to prosecute electoral fraud and a violation of Georgian state law relating to incitement to electoral fraud, he said.

“It’s pretty appalling that the only question is whether the president is sufficiently detached from reality to believe he hasn’t committed a crime,” Levitt said.

The White House did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. During the call, President Raffensperger threatened possible legal ramifications if his demands were not met.

“You know what you did and you don’t report it,” Trump said during the call. “This is a criminal, this is a crime. And you cannot allow it. This is a great risk for you and for Ryan, your lawyer. This is a great risk.”

The call comes just days before two major Georgia Senate runoff elections, in which Democratic candidates’ victories in both races would turn control of the chamber, and less than a month before Biden’s inauguration. Trump is holding a rally for the Republican candidates on Monday.

Georgia is one of several states where the Trump campaign or the president’s supporters have fought unsuccessfully to change or invalidate the vote since Trump’s loss to Biden in the November election.

None of the lawsuits, recounts, or investigations in any state have identified the type of widespread electoral fraud or miscounts that would be required to reverse the election in Trump’s favor.

The number of votes in Georgia and other states since the November elections has already been confirmed, and the electoral college has confirmed Joe Biden’s victory.

Biden’s victory in Georgia was a big change in the Republican-controlled state as he was the first Democratic presidential candidate since Bill Clinton in 1992. After the first count showed Biden as the winner of the state, Georgia carried out a recount that showed the same result. Raffensperger confirmed the result on November 20th.

The tight profit margin and the presence of Republicans in key positions have made it a target in the Trump team’s efforts to change the election results. Trump has also pressured Governor Brian Kemp to help reverse the outcome, but Kemp said it was not legal for him to call a special legislative session to appoint a new list of presidential voters.

Biden’s victory is due to be confirmed by a joint congressional session on Wednesday, but a group of 11 Republican senators and elected senators, including Texas Senator Ted Cruz, want to delay the move, as do some members of the Republican House. Vice President Mike Pence “welcomed” the move to delay certification, according to his chief of staff, but others like Utah Senator Mitt Romney have been harshly critical of the plan.

Trump is expected to participate in anti-certification protests in Washington on Wednesday.

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Business

Trump to attend D.C. protests in opposition to Congress certifying Biden victory

Some Republicans think Trump is trying to sabotage GOP, Mike Allen says

U.S. President Donald Trump waves as he boards Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, United States, on December 23, 2020.

Tom Brenner | Reuters

President Donald Trump said Sunday he would take part in protests in Washington DC on January 6, the day Congress confirms the vote of the electoral college and declares President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

The president shared a video clip on Twitter encouraging supporters to protest the November election results and saying he would be there.

Trump still refuses to endorse the race and continues to make unsubstantiated claims of electoral fraud that have been consistently denied by state and federal courts as well as his own Department of Justice.

The joint session of Congress to count the votes is a routine process and marks the final step in confirming Biden as the winner.

A group of Republican senators and elected senators are pushing for Biden’s certification to be postponed Wednesday, which is unlikely to change the electoral college record, which Biden won between 306 and 232.

Protesters plan to gather at the Washington Monument, Freedom Plaza and the Capitol. The Proud Boys, a far-right group that promoted violence, have vowed to participate incognito.

The nation’s capital has become a battleground for violent protests in recent months. Thousands of Trump supporters gathered in November to protest the results of the DC presidential election. The demonstrations eventually turned violent and nearly two dozen people were arrested.

Protesters also clashed at rallies in Washington State and Washington DC in December over election results, racial injustice and pandemic restrictions. At least four people were stabbed to death after a pro-Trump rally in DC.

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Politics

11 Republican senators push to delay certification of Biden victory

11 Republican senators push to delay certification of Biden victory

Eleven GOP senators and elected senators will press for the delay in confirming President-elect Joe Biden’s victory over President Donald Trump in the electoral college during a formal joint session of Congress on Wednesday, they said in a statement.

The Senators, led by Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas, cited allegations of fraud and irregularities in the 2020 election for which they presented no evidence and which have been repeatedly rejected by courts across the country.

The Justice Department said it found no evidence of widespread fraud in the elections.

Efforts to reverse the latest of dozen Republican attempts to undo Trump’s loss are unlikely to change the electoral college’s record, which Biden won between 306 and 232. Biden is expected to be inaugurated on January 20th.

In their statement, the senators said they would object to the certification of voters from “controversial states” unless Congress sets up a commission to review those states’ elections. The commission would conduct a “10-day emergency audit,” they wrote.

“Once completed, individual states would evaluate the results of the commission and, if necessary, could convene a special legislative session to confirm a change in their vote,” the senators said in the statement.

Mike Gwin, a spokesman for the Biden campaign, said in a statement: “This stunt will not change the fact that President-elect Biden will be sworn in on Jan. 20. These unsubstantiated claims have already been examined and rejected by Trump’s own.” Attorney General, dozens of courts and election officials from both parties. “

Marc Elias, a Democratic election attorney who has overseen the Biden campaign’s response to many of the lawsuits against the 2020 election, wrote in a post on Twitter that there is “no way” that the GOP efforts will “change the election result.” .

The Senators who signed the declaration are Cruz, Ron Johnson, R-Wis., James Lankford, R-Okla., Steve Daines, R-Mont., John Kennedy, R-La., Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn . and Mike Braun, R-Ind.

The elected Senators who signed it are Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama. The elected senators will officially take office on Sunday.

Wednesday’s joint congressional session, usually a formality, takes place when lawmakers are required to officially count the electoral college votes given to each presidential candidate and announce the winner. Vice President Mike Pence will chair the session as President of the Senate.

If at least one senator and one member of the House of Representatives object to the results of a state, the joint session is suspended and the House and Senate meet separately for a maximum of two hours to consider the objection. A majority of both houses of Congress must approve the objection and reject the votes of the electoral college.

While the Republicans control the 100-member Senate, the Democrats hold a majority in the House of Representatives, making it virtually impossible for an objection to have a realistic chance of success.

In their statement, the senators acknowledge that their plan has little chance of success and that they “expect most, if not all, Democrats and perhaps more than a few Republicans” to vote against them.

In a post on Twitter, the campaign wrote “THANK YOU!” and listed the names of all eleven current and incoming Senators, as well as Senator Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who previously said he would object to electoral college certification.

“It is encouraging to see so many patriots emerge calling for an investigation into the rampant electoral fraud and irregularities we saw on November 3rd,” Jenna Ellis, senior legal advisor for the campaign, said in a statement.

Efforts to reverse Biden’s victory have drawn fire from the Democrats and an increasing number of Republicans. In December, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Urged his party not to object to the results of the electoral college.

“The electoral college has spoken. So today I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden,” McConnell said on December 15, after the electoral college officially confirmed Biden’s victory and weeks after NBC News and other major media outlets announced the outcome of the race.

John Thune, RS.D., has repeatedly said that Trump’s efforts to ditch the results are likely to go down like a “shot dog”.

Senator Mitt Romney, R-Utah, the 2012 GOP presidential candidate, said Hawley’s move was “disappointing and destructive”.

Following Saturday’s announcement, Senator Pat Toomey, R-Penn. Said that Hawley and Cruz “are undermining the right of the people to choose their own leaders”.

“The senators justify their intention by saying that there have been many allegations of fraud. But allegations of fraud from a losing campaign cannot justify overturning an election,” Toomey said. “They do not acknowledge that these allegations were heard in courtrooms across America and not supported by evidence.”

Toomey added that he voted for Trump and approved him for re-election. “But on Wednesday I intend to vigorously defend our form of government by opposing these efforts to disenfranchise millions of voters in my state and others,” he said.

Senator Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said in a statement earlier in the day that she would vote to count the electoral college’s votes.

“I took an oath to support and defend the United States Constitution, and I will do it on January 6 – just as I want to do every day as I serve the people of Alaska,” Murkowski said.

“The courts and state lawmakers have all done their duty to hear legal allegations and have found nothing to justify reversing the results,” she added. “I urge my colleagues from both parties to acknowledge this and, together with me, maintain confidence in the electoral college and our elections so that we can ensure that we continue to have the confidence of the American people.”

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Politics

Asian American Christians could possibly be key to victory

Asian American Christians could be key to victory

Georgia Democratic Senate candidates Raphael Warnock (R) and Jon Ossoff (L) clash their elbows during a “It’s Time to Vote” drive-in rally on December 28, 2020 in Stonecrest, Georgia.

Jessica McGowan | Getty Images

When Helen Ho founded Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta in 2010, she made public relations a central part of the organization’s civic engagement.

Growing up in Korean-American churches in South Carolina and Georgia, she understood the importance of religious groups to Asian Americans and Pacific islanders.

“When I was growing up, the Church was literally the only nonprofit that my parents gave money to,” said Ho, former executive director of the Georgia bipartisan advocacy group.

In American politics, the most prominent religious voter blocs have historically been Christians: white Evangelical voters, who were largely a Republican stronghold, and black Protestant voters, who mostly joined the Democrats.

Religious Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders or AAPIs in Georgia and across the country are not a monolith. Their beliefs include Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and other traditions. Amid a black and white political and religious divide, Asian American Christian communities represent untapped voter networks for political parties.

In the Georgia Senate runoff election, Democrats increased the reach of AAPI voters overall in hopes of resuming the high turnout that helped turn the state blue in November. Incumbent GOP Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler will run a runoff against Democratic challengers Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock on January 5th to determine which party controls the Senate.

Faith was at the top of the runoff elections. Warnock is the senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. preached. Ossoff talks about his Jewish upbringing on the campaign. Perdue is a Methodist and Loeffler is a Catholic; The two have addressed conservative Christian voters.

But candidates on both sides of the aisle have largely overlooked the role of religion for Asian-American voters in helping them decide what is likely to be a thin line election.

Belief among Asian Americans

Asian American voters made up only about 3% of the Georgian electorate in 2019, but a historic surge in AAPI voters helped lead President-elect Joe Biden to victory in the state, according to Democratic data firm TargetSmart.

A 2012 study by the Pew Research Center found that a large number of Asian Americans in the US, approximately 42%, identify as Christians. The proportion of Christians among Koreans rises to 71% and among Filipino Americans to 89%.

Churches provide community centers and support networks for Asian Americans. Faith institutions are embedded in the growing AAPI communities in Georgia, and particularly in the Atlanta metropolitan area, said Helen Jin Kim, professor of religious history at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, who also partners with local faith leaders and Asian-American advocacy groups.

“These church common rooms are really important when it comes to voting behavior, but they are often overlooked,” Kim said. “AAPIs are part of a diverse group of religious communities and it is important to be able to connect with these spaces as well.”

James Woo, communications manager and Korean outreach director for Advancing Justice-Atlanta, said AAPI churches are “the go-to place for us to share news with a larger community,” about impartial voter registration and voting efforts.

“Particularly for Asian immigrants and first-generation refugees who may not be part of the ‘mainstream’ or English-language press, they can get information about their society either through their faith group or through their home language press,” Ho said.

Political organization

During the 2018 midterm elections, Ho helped organize an early election campaign between Korean-American churches in the Atlanta area, inspired by the tradition of the black churches in the south.

However, there was less contact with AAPI communities from political groups through a religious appeal.

Ivanka Trump and Senators Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) and David Perdue (R-GA) wave to the crowd at a campaign rally on December 21, 2020 in Milton, Georgia.

Elijah Nouvelage | Getty Images

Unlike other groups of Christian voters, Asian-American Christians have not consolidated under either party, said Janelle Wong, a political scientist at the University of Maryland and author of Immigrants, Evangelicals and Politics in an Era of Demographic Change.

This is in contrast to the political affiliations of white Protestant voters and black Protestant voters. Before the 2020 presidential election, 78% of white registered voters supported GOP President Donald Trump, while 90% of black registered voters supported Democratic President-elect Joe Biden, the Pew Research Center found.

Wong’s research found that AAPI Christian voters are more conservative than Asian Americans, who do not identify as evangelical but are more liberal than their white evangelical counterparts. Asian-American evangelicals often join the Republican Party on some social issues such as abortion, but the Democrats on issues such as immigration, health care, and race.

Political and social views also vary between different communities because the Asian-American identity encompasses a wide range of races, cultures, and experiences.

“For Democrats, in a way, there’s more thematic focus, but there’s not much mobilization,” Wong said. “Until recently, there hasn’t been the same concentrated effort among the Democrats for Asian Americans with religious backgrounds or Asian Americans as a whole.”

The Georgia Senate is expiring

The Perdue Campaign, Warnock Campaign, and Georgia Democratic Party did not respond to CNBC’s requests for comments to contact Asian American Christian communities. The Loeffler campaign referred CNBC to the Georgia GOP, which released a press release on their updated Asia-Pacific-American advisory board but did not provide details on how to contact AAPI Christian communities.

The Ossoff Campaign has hosted dozens of AAPI faith events over the year, including targeted contacts with Ismaili communities, visits to mosques, and virtual events and meetings with AAPI faith leaders.

Cam Ashling, Osoff’s AAPI constituency director, “has made engaging AAPI voters in Georgia a key element of the campaign to mobilize AAPI voters across the state,” the campaign said.

Ashling hosted a call with Korean-American pastors in Augusta and, according to the campaign, partnered with a coalition called AAPI Christians for Biden.

AAPI Christians for Biden said it had a press conference scheduled for December 17 with Korean-American pastors from Atlanta to support the Democratic Senate candidates ahead of the runoff elections. According to one of the organizers, the Ossoff campaign said it couldn’t participate while on a bus tour and showed an interest in doing something in the near future.

The Warnock campaign worked with the coalition ahead of the scheduled press conference, the organizers said, but the event failed the day before. The Warnock campaign announced in an email that there was a planning conflict.

Rev. Byeong Han, a pastor with the Korean Central Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, was one of the speakers scheduled for the press conference. There are certain restrictions on the partisan activity of the churches in order to maintain their tax exemption status. However, these restrictions do not apply to impartiality or religious leaders acting in their personal capacity.

Han said that while some of his pastors in Korean and Asia-American ministries are concerned about discussing politics, he firmly believes that civic engagement is important for AAPI Christians.

“Ever since I came to this church, I have been encouraging my ward to do their voter registration and vote,” Han said. “I usually tell my members that this is not about politics. This is about the rights and responsibilities of citizens.”

Han hopes that more Asian American Christian communities will continue to participate in the political process.

“Asian Americans are very important in this election and beyond,” Han said. “So let’s step up, don’t step back.”

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Politics

Supreme Court docket Rejects Texas Lawsuit Difficult Biden’s Victory

Supreme Court Rejects Texas Lawsuit Challenging Biden's Victory

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton responded with his own letter on Friday morning. “Whatever Pennsylvania’s definition of turmoil,” he wrote, “moving this court to heal grave threats to Texas Senate suffrage and the suffrage of its citizens in presidential elections affirms the Constitution, which is the opposite of turmoil . ” ”

Allegations that the election was tainted by widespread fraud have been rebutted by Mr Trump’s own Attorney General William P. Barr, who said this month the Justice Department had not uncovered election fraud “on a scale that could have changed the election. “

Some 20 Democratic-led states, in a brief endorsement of the four battlefield states, urged the Supreme Court to “reject Texas’s last-minute attempt to discard the results of a popular vote that is safely monitored and certified by its sister states. ”

Georgia, which won Mr Biden by less than 12,000 votes out of nearly five million votes cast, said in his letter that it had handled his election with integrity and care. “In this election cycle,” the letter said, “Georgia has done what the constitution was empowered to do: it implemented electoral processes, managed the election in the face of the logistical challenges posed by Covid-19, and confirmed and confirmed the election.” Results – over and over again. Even so, Texas sued Georgia. “

Even ahead of Election Day, Mr Trump and his Republican allies filed nearly five dozen lawsuits against the treatment, casting and counting of votes in courts in at least eight different states.

They generally lost these cases and often drew blistering reproaches from judges who heard them. Along the way, Mr Trump has not nearly overturned election results in a single state, let alone the minimum of three he would need to claim Mr Biden’s victory.

The first set of measures preceded the elections and was aimed at ending or rolling back the voting measures that states across the country had been taking to deal with the coronavirus crisis. In Texas, for example, Republicans were prosecuting a failed attempt in federal court to stop the drive-through vote in Harris County, home of Houston. A similar move was taken in Pennsylvania to prevent the state from accepting postal ballot papers received after election day.

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Politics

Supreme Courtroom rejects Trump backed lawsuit that sought to overturn Biden election victory

Supreme Court rejects Trump backed lawsuit that sought to overturn Biden election victory

United States President Donald Trump looks on during a ceremony to present wrestler Dan Gable with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC on December 7, 2020.

Saul Loeb | AFP | Getty Images

The United States Supreme Court on Friday rejected an offer tabled by Texas and backed by President Donald Trump in an attempt to undo Joe Biden’s election victories in key swing states of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The ruling dealt a death blow to Trump’s desperate and unsuccessful efforts to undo Biden’s planned victory at the electoral college. It took three days for voters to cast their ballots in their respective states and for Biden’s victory to be finalized.

Suffrage experts said from the start that the lawsuit is unlikely to succeed. But Trump, who himself had applied to intervene in the case, had hyped Paxton’s lawsuit as “the big one”.

The court on Friday denied Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s attempt to file the lawsuit against the four battlefield states. The judges said Paxton didn’t have reasons to sue the other states over changes they made to their voting procedures amid the coronavirus pandemic.

“The Texas state’s application for permission to file a notice of appeal is denied due to a lack of standing under Article III of the Constitution,” the court said.

“Texas has shown no judicial interest in the way any other state conducts its elections. All other pending motions are dismissed as in dispute.”

Trump, who appointed three judges to the nine-member court, had said ahead of the November 3rd election that he believed the Supreme Court would ultimately decide the race.

“I think it is very important that we have nine judges,” Trump said shortly after the death of the liberal judiciary Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September.

Biden spokesman Mike Gwin said in a statement on Friday evening that the court had “decided and quickly rejected the recent attack by Donald Trump and his allies on the democratic process.”

“This is no surprise – dozens of judges, election officials from both parties and Trump’s own attorney general have rejected his baseless attempts to deny that he lost the election,” said Gwin. “The clear and authoritative victory of President-elect Biden will be confirmed by the electoral college on Monday and sworn in on January 20th.”

The Texas lawsuit asked the Supreme Court to invalidate the election results of the four battlefield states by stating that their votes “cannot be counted” in the electoral college.

Biden’s victories in the four states, which together had 62 votes, had brought him over the 270-vote threshold required to secure the presidency. Biden is expected to win 306 votes, compared to 232 for Trump.

If Texas had won the lawsuit, it would have canceled Biden’s victory.

Two of the most conservative Supreme Court justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, said in brief disagreement that they allowed Paxton’s lawsuit to be filed, but added that they would “grant no other relief” requested in the case .

“In my view, there is no discretion to refuse to file a notice of appeal in a case that falls within our original jurisdiction,” Alito wrote in a statement backed by Thomas. “I would therefore grant the request to file the notice of appeal, but would not grant any other relief, and I do not express an opinion on any other subject.”

More than a dozen states in which Trump won the referendum filed briefs in support of Texas’s action. More than 120 Republican members of Congress, including House Minority Chairman Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., Filed similar Friend of the Court letters shortly thereafter.

But about two dozen states and territories that Biden had won filed their own pleadings against the Texas appeal.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., In a damning letter from her dear colleague on Friday afternoon, accused the Republicans of supporting the case of “electoral subversion that threatens our democracy”.

“This lawsuit is an act of GOP desperation that violates the principles enshrined in our American democracy,” wrote Pelosi.

“As members of Congress, we take a solemn oath to support and defend the Constitution,” her letter said. “The Republicans are undermining the Constitution through their ruthless and fruitless assault on our democracy, which threatens to seriously undermine public confidence in our most sacred democratic institutions and slow our progress on the urgent challenges ahead.”

Rudy Giuliani, the attorney who spearheaded Trump’s efforts to reverse Biden’s victory through legal proceedings, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Senator Ben Sasse, a Republican from Nebraska who has clashed with Trump, said in a statement that the Supreme Court has finally “closed the book on the nonsense.”

“Since election night, a lot of people have puzzled voters by turning the Kenyan birther guy. ‘Chavez carved the election out of the grave conspiracy theories,’ but any rule of law American should take comfort that the Colonel The court – including all three tips from President Trump – closed the book on the nonsense, “he said.

Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel, who represented her state against Paxton’s lawsuit, said the ruling was “an important reminder that we are a nation of laws, and while some may bow to the wishes of a single person, they will.” Courts don’t do this. “

NBC News legal analyst Benjamin Wittes noted that while Alito and Thomas opposed the decision, they likely would have opposed it on the matter.