Supreme Court gets a new justice

The Senate yesterday voted 52-48 to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, just over a week before Election Day and 30 days after she was nominated by President Trump to fill the seat of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It was a party-line vote save for Sen. Susan Collins, the lone Republican who voted against Barrett. In a White House ceremony last night, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas administered the constitutional oath. The 48-year-old judge's confirmation solidifies the court's conservative majority, potentially shaping the future of abortion rights and healthcare law for generations. —NPR

• — "You will never get your credibility back." Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Barrett's confirmation "will go down as one of the darkest days" in U.S. Senate history. He added that his Republican colleagues "decided to thwart the will of the people" by holding the vote eight days ahead of the presidential election, despite opposing President Obama's nominee eight months before the election in 2016. —Axios
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• — With Barrett now seated on the court, Republicans are pushing for reconsideration of a Pennsylvania case on mail-in voting—one of several legal challenges across the country seeking an audience before the high court, leaving rules for counting ballots in several key battleground states still in dispute just a week before Election Day.
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• — Mirroring Trump's rhetoric on mail-in voting, Justice Brett Kavanaugh last night set the battle lines for how the Supreme Court should consider such lawsuits. He wrote, "Under the U.S. Constitution, the state courts do not have a blank check to rewrite state election laws for federal elections." —CNN

Judge allows defamation suit to proceed

A federal judge today denied the Justice Department's effort to effectively end a defamation lawsuit against Donald Trump brought by magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll, who has alleged he raped her in a luxury department store dressing room in the 1990s. The DOJ had sought to intervene in the case and substitute itself as defendant, a move that likely would have curbed the proceedings, since the federal government can't be sued for defamation.

• — The conclusion allows for Trump to be sued personally for defamation. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled that Trump "is not an 'employee of the government,' as Congress defined that term," and therefore the lawsuit isn't, as the DOJ argued, against the U.S. 
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• — The case is now set to proceed in federal court. Carroll had originally filed her case in New York state court, and after Trump challenged it, a trial court judge ruled in August that the lawsuit could proceed, allowing Carroll's attorneys to move forward in their efforts to obtain a DNA sample from Trump and take his deposition under oath. That's when the DOJ stepped in.
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• — Carroll is gratified by the outcome. "When I spoke out about what Donald Trump did to me in a department store dressing room, I was speaking out against an individual," she said. "When Donald Trump called me a liar and denied that he had ever met me, he was not speaking on behalf of the United States." —CNN

Rangappa: If Trump fires Wray

"The FBI's unwillingness, under [Director Christopher] Wray, to validate Trump's narrative might be the last institutional check we have against the president's manufactured reality. If Trump wins and is able to replace Wray with a yes-man (or woman) like [Attorney General Bill] Barr or [Director of National Intelligence John] Ratcliffe, there will be no way for the country's most powerful federal law enforcement agency to push back on Trump's claims. And when it comes to his enemies, the danger won't be that Trump will actually 'lock them up'—it's that he won't even bother trying, instead conveniently keeping his opponents under a perpetual cloud of suspicion." —Asha Rangappa in The Washington Post

Ed. Note: Asha Rangappa is a senior lecturer at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale University and a former FBI agent.

MORE: Trump's post-election execution list —Axios

POTUS calls COVID-19 'fake news' again

Out on the campaign trail in the last week before the presidental election, Donald Trump is harkening back to an old standby, calling the coronavirus pandemic a "Fake News Media Conspiracy." Yesterday, he tweeted, "Many young people who heal very fast. 99.9%. Corrupt Media conspiracy at all time high. On November 4th., topic will totally change. VOTE!" He also said again that cases are only up because we "TEST, TEST, TEST," a claim doctors have vigorously refuted.

• — In reality, the U.S. is reporting a record-breaking number of new coronavirus cases. On Sunday, the country reported a weekly average of about 68,767 new cases every day, the highest seven-day average recorded yet. Additionally, COVID-19 hospitalizations were growing by 5% or more in 34 states as of Sunday. Fifteen states hit record highs in hospitalizations. 
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• — Trump's former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, warned that the U.S. is "at a tipping point" in its pandemic. "We're likely to see a very dense epidemic. I think we're right now at the cusp of what is going to be exponential spread in parts of the country," Gottlieb said on Monday.
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• — Public health officials and medical experts also say an uncontrolled virus through the fall and winter months could lead to a sharp increase in deaths. A coronavirus model from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, once cited by the White House, now projects more than 385,600 COVID-19 deaths by Feb. 1. —CNBC

Palfrey: Keep calm and don't spread disinfo

"As tempting as it may be to retweet and rave about disinformation, that can be counterproductive. By publicly calling out false claims, we risk elevating the disinformation—and unintentionally spreading it. ... [I]f you see disinformation about registration deadlines and voting rules, you should instead share accurate information from a trusted source, like 866ourvote.org, without repeating the misinformation. Voters can also report acts of disinformation to tip lines, such as...Common Cause, which then crafts rapid responses to rebut dangerous, false claims." —Quentin Palfrey in The Fulcrum

Ed. Note: Quentin Palfrey is chair of the Voter Protection Corps.

MORE: Election officials say they're getting suspicious emails that may be part of malicious attack on voting —The Hill

'There is no place for QAnon in the Republican Party'

House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy made that statement back in August, becoming the highest-ranking Republican to publicly condemn QAnon—the conspiracy theory that posits that Donald Trump is secretly fighting a global cabal of child-sex predators that includes prominent Democrats, Hollywood elites, and "deep state" allies. But is McCarthy right? A recent poll by Morning Consult said 38% of Republicans believe that at least parts of the conspiracy are true, and Trump himself has refused to renounce it and has even praised it as patriotic.

• — Even worse, more than two dozen candidates for Congress in the Nov. 3 elections have endorsed or given credence to QAnon or promoted QAnon content online, according to Media Matters. Two are independents; the rest are Republicans.
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• — One candidate, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is running for Congress in Georgia, said in a 2017 video about QAnon: "There's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out." However, after winning her primary runoff in August, she backtracked, saying that QAnon does not "represent" her.
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• — That did not stop her from recently attacking a House Republican, Rep. Denver Riggleman, who co-sponsored a House-passed resolution condemning QAnon. On Twitter, Greene called the resolution "useless" and asked why the lawmakers had not done a resolution condemning the anti-fascist movement antifa. —Reuters

Borger: Can the GOP come back from an autocratic turn?

"The Republican Party has become dramatically more illiberal in the past two decades and now more closely resembles ruling parties in autocratic societies than its former center-right equivalents in Europe, according to a new international study. In a significant shift since 2000, the GOP has taken to demonizing and encouraging violence against its opponents, adopting attitudes and tactics comparable to ruling nationalist parties in Hungary, India, Poland, and Turkey. The shift has both led to and been driven by the rise of Donald Trump." —Julian Borger in The Guardian

Ed. Note: Julian Borger is The Guardian's world affairs editor and the author of "The Butcher's Trail," about the pursuit and capture of Balkan war criminals.

MORE: NYT Ed Board: RIP, GOP —The New York Times

Paying it forward

College student Gordon Wayne recently walked a journey that spanned over 500 miles, from central Virginia to Boston, Mass. His goals? To get to school and to raise funds for and awareness of the crisis of homelessness. 

• — A year ago, Wayne was living out of his car and working 10-hour shifts at a local amusement park. He spent his evenings applying to college. After getting admitted to a local community college, he got accepted into his dream school, Boston College, on a full scholarship.
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• — Wayne walked 30-40 miles a day over 16 days making his way to BC. Along the way, he raised more than $100,000 for the National Alliance to End Homelessness, which will help other people facing the same challenges he was. 
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• — "Every time I want to quit, I just think about the people I'm doing this for," Wayne said of his journey. "This is bigger than myself, and I have to keep going." —Karunavirus.org

Trump says he's done a great job handling the coronavirus. And he gets into his red state vs. blue state nonsense because red states are doing a "great job" as well. Sadly, interviewers don't seem to know any facts/data when he spews this garbage.

Here's a simple example that maybe, just maybe, an interviewer or two might reference to push back on him. Arizona is a red state with a GOP governor and GOP legislature. The state has about 7 million people, with roughly 238,000 cases and 5,900 deaths as of this writing. Japan has about 127 million people, roughly 97,000 cases and 1,700 deaths as of this writing.

What's wrong with this picture? Yep, just one example of a great job by a totally red state. —Bill T., Arizona

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