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State primary elections were held yesterday in Arizona, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, and Washington and the results were…interesting!
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First, the unexpectedly-great news. Kansas voters resoundingly rejected a ballot initiative that would have removed abortion protections from their state constitution. The implications for November are stark, underscoring support for the right to abortion even in deep red states, which could make midterms more worrisome for Republicans than previously thought. Similar votes on abortion-related ballot initiatives will take place in November in California, Vermont, Kentucky, and Montana, and the codification of Roe will be on the ballot everywhere.
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Now in not-so-good news: It was a big night for peddlers of the Big Lie, and a mostly bad night for Republicans who didn’t obediently fall in line for disgraced former president Donald Trump. Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers and House January 6 Committee witness lost his primary for a state Senate seat after refusing Trump’s pleas to help him overturn the 2020 election. Also in Arizona, two major election liars won important primaries: Blake Masters won the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, and Mark Finchem for secretary of state. The GOP gubernatorial primary is currently too close to call, but it’s possible that voters have chosen yet another Big Liar: Kari Lake, who said that if elected, she would try to get rid of voting machines and vote by mail (???). Kari, very much in Trump’s image, declared herself the winner even though the race hasn’t been called. The Republican primary for attorney general still doesn’t have a clear winner, but both of the top candidates in that race are election deniers.
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Three out of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump faced pro-Trump challengers last night, and results were mixed. Rep. Peter Meijer (R-MI) lost his primary to an extreme far-right candidate, Trump-backed John Gibbs (boosted by Democrats in the hope that Gibbs will be easier to beat come November, and dear God I hope that gamble pays off). But Reps. Jamie Herrera Beutler (R-WA) and Dan Newhouse (R-WA) are both projected to win their primaries. Newhouse represents a particularly Republican district, so in all likelihood this means he’ll be returning to D.C. next year.
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Whether or not he runs in 2024, more results from Tuesday night demonstrate this is still very much Donald Trump’s Republican Party.
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Conservative commentator and some-rich-lady Tudor Dixon (are you kidding me with this name) won the Republican primary for Governor of Michigan last night after receiving an endorsement from Trump last week, as well as backing from prominent evil Michigan Republican billionaires the DeVos family. On the Democratic side in Michigan, moderate Rep. Haley Stevens is the projected winner in Michigan’s newly-drawn 11th congressional district over progressive Rep. Andy Levin. We can attribute Levin’s defeat to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), who attacked Levin on pretextual grounds for daring to criticize the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians. It didn’t seem to matter to AIPAC that Levin is Jewish.
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After former president Trump hilariously endorsed just “ERIC” (no last name) in Missouri’s primary for U.S. Senate (when both top candidates in the state Republican primary were named Eric) it looks like the less controversial Eric won the day. Missouri Republicans feared that former Gov./violent sadist/child abuser Eric Greitens (R-MO) would render the seat vulnerable to Democrats if he won the nomination on account of, you know, being a piece of garbage. Attorney General Eric Schmitt (R-MO) won the nomination instead. Knowing Missouri Republicans, I’m sure Schmitt is abominable in his own special way.
These, ahem, colorful primary results make one thing abundantly clear: we’re going to see one hell of a fight this November.
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On the latest episode Hot Take, Mary and Amy are back together! This episode the duo is sitting down with Alleen Brown, a New York-based reporter focused on environmental justice issues, to discuss the unique intersection of climate change and the prison industrial system.
Listen to new episodes of Hot Take every Friday on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Conspiracy theorist and guy-who-always-looks-like-he’s-about-to-pop-a-blood-vessel Alex Jones testified today in his defamation hearing in Austin, TX, and left with a great big heap of unexpected new problems. Parents of children killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting seek $150 million in damages from Jones, who spread serial falsehoods about the attack and the survivors. Jones was the only witness to testify in his defense, and he simply could not! stop! lying! When confronted about internal Infowars emails, Jones claimed, “I don’t use email,” and was then shown that the email came from his address. He said the company was broke and any judgment over $2 million would “sink” it, before being shown record from an Infowars business officer telling Jones that the company had earned $800,000 gross selling their products in a single day, which would amount to a yearly revenue of almost $300 million. His company Free Speech Systems (kill me) filed for federal bankruptcy last year, but Sandy Hook families have separately sued Jones over these financial claims, arguing that the company is hiding assets owned by Jones and his family through shell corporations. In a truly eye-popping twist, Alex Jones’s lawyers also accidentally sent the Sandy Hook lawyers an entire digital copy of his cell phone records, with every text message he sent and every call he made in the past two years. The Sandy Hook lawyers intimated that the contents of Jones’s phone contain evidence of criminal activity, and the House January 6 Committee now wants to get its hands on those text messages, too. Jurors began considering damages today.
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Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-IN) was killed in a car crash today along with her district director Zachary Potts, 27, and her communications director Emma Thomson, 28.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has now left Taiwan after completing her visit, so everybody chill.
Five former Treasury secretaries from bipartisan administrations signed a statement in strong support of the Inflation Reduction Act.
The U.S. and Iran will resume indirect talks about potentially reviving the 2015 nuclear deal in Vienna tomorrow.
A new bipartisan proposal is circulating in Congress that would hand regulatory authority of cryptocurrency to the Commodities Futures Trading Commission as lawmakers lose patience with the crypto industry’s attempts to proliferate unregulated.
Baseball Hall of Fame broadcaster Vin Scully, who was the reigning announcer for the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers for 67 years died last night at 94.
In conservative Orange County, CA, the San Clemente City Council is considering a resolution to ban abortion within the city.
Retailers T.J. Maxx and Marshalls, both owned by the same parent company, will pay a $13 million fine for continuing to sell baby products after they were recalled due to risks of infant suffocation and death. Seems bad!
Under a new (deranged) Georgia law, fetuses now have “full legal recognition” of personhood, meaning their parents can claim them on tax returns even before the baby is born. These people are...not well.
The man accused of killing seven Fourth of July parade goers and wounding dozens more in a mass shooting in Highland Park, IL, pleaded not guilty to 117 felony counts, including 21 counts of first-degree murder yesterday.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) suggested that Social Security and Medicare should be eliminated and instead turned into discretionary spending approved or rejected on a yearly basis. Hopefully Wisconsin voters will finally reject Johnson in November.
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Two days of going long on Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) means yes, I am at my spiritual breaking point. Sinema still hasn’t indicated whether or not she will vote for the Inflation Reduction Act, but according to sources close to her office, she wants to make some changes to the climate, healthcare, and taxes bill. We reported yesterday that Sinema has been heavily lobbied by corporate America in the days since the IRA went public, and now it looks like she wants to eliminate language related to scaling back the carried interest loophole, which would change the way some investment income is taxed. Cutting that provision alone would take $14 billion in revenue off the table and would perpetuate an unfair tax code. She also reportedly wants $5 billion in drought resiliency funding added to the bill, which unlike the former ask, seems reasonable enough.
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