Bipartisan landmark same-sex marriage bill wins U.S. Senate passage!

Landmark same-sex marriage bill passed by US Senate | World News -  Hindustan Times

 

Dear Commons Community,

The U.S. Senate passed bipartisan legislation yesterday to protect same-sex marriages, an extraordinary sign of shifting national politics on the issue and a measure of relief for the hundreds of thousands of same-sex couples who have married since the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision that legalized gay marriage nationwide.

The bill, which would ensure that same-sex and interracial marriages are enshrined in federal law, was approved 61-36 yesterday, including support from 12 Republicans. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the legislation was “a long time coming” and part of America’s “difficult but inexorable march towards greater equality.”

Democrats are moving quickly, while the party still holds the majority in both chambers of Congress. The legislation now moves to the House for a final vote.  As reported by various media.

President Joe Biden praised the bipartisan vote and said he will sign the bill “promptly and proudly” if it is passed by the House. He said it will ensure that LGBTQ youth “will grow up knowing that they, too, can lead full, happy lives and build families of their own.”

The bill has gained steady momentum since the Supreme Court’s June decision that overturned the federal right to an abortion, a ruling that included a concurring opinion from Justice Clarence Thomas that suggested same-sex marriage could also come under threat. Bipartisan Senate negotiations got a kick-start this summer when 47 Republicans unexpectedly voted for a House bill and gave supporters new optimism.

The legislation would not force any state to allow same-sex couples to marry. But it would require states to recognize all marriages that were legal where they were performed, and protect current same-sex unions, if the court’s 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision were to be overturned. It’s a stunning bipartisan endorsement, and evidence of societal change, after years of bitter divisiveness on the issue.

A new law protecting same-sex marriages would also be a major victory for Democrats as they relinquish their two years of consolidated power in Washington, and a massive win for advocates who have been pushing for decades for federal legislation. It comes as the LGBTQ community has faced violent attacks, such as the shooting last weekend at a gay nightclub in Colorado that killed five people and injured at least 17.

“Our community really needs a win, we have been through a lot,” said Kelley Robinson, the incoming president of the Human Rights Campaign, which advocates on LGBTQ issues. “As a queer person who is married, I feel a sense of relief right now. I know my family is safe.”

Robinson was in the Senate chamber for the vote with her wife, Becky, and toddler son. “It was more emotional than I expected,” she said.

The vote was personal for many senators, too. Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat who is the first openly gay senator and was the lead sponsor of the bill, tearfully hugged Schumer and others as the final vote was called. Baldwin, who has been working on gay rights issues for almost four decades, tweeted thanks to the same-sex and interracial couples who she said made the moment possible.

“By living as your true selves, you changed the hearts and minds of people around you,” she wrote.

Schumer said on Tuesday that he was wearing the tie he wore at his daughter’s wedding, “one of the happiest moments of my life.” He also recalled the “harrowing conversation” he had with his daughter and her wife in September 2020 when they heard that liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had passed away. “Could our right to marry be undone?” they asked at the time.

With conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett replacing Ginsburg, the court has now overturned Roe v. Wade and the federal right to an abortion, stoking fears about Obergefell and other rights protected by the court. But sentiment has shifted on same-sex marriage, with more than two-thirds of the public now in support.

Still, Schumer said it was notable that the Senate was even having the debate after years of Republican opposition. “A decade ago, it would have strained all of our imaginations to envision both sides talking about protecting the rights of same-sex married couples,” he said.

Passage came after the Senate rejected three Republican amendments to protect the rights of religious institutions and others to still oppose such marriages. Supporters of the legislation argued those amendments were unnecessary because the bill had already been amended to clarify that it does not affect rights of private individuals or businesses that are currently enshrined in law. The bill would also make clear that a marriage is between two people, an effort to ward off some far-right criticism that the legislation could endorse polygamy.

Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who has been lobbying his fellow GOP senators to support the legislation for months, pointed to the number of religious groups supporting the bill, including The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  Some of those groups were part of negotiations on the bipartisan amendment.

Congratulations to the U.S. Senate!

Tony

Department of Justice Scores Big Victory:  Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and Kelly Meggs Convicted of Sedition!

Jan. 6 sedition trial underway for Oath Keepers leader

 

Dear Commons Community,

Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes was convicted yesterday of seditious conspiracy for a violent plot to overturn President Joe Biden’s election, handing the Justice Department a major victory in its massive prosecution of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

A Washington, D.C., jury found Rhodes guilty of sedition after three days of deliberations in the nearly two-month-long trial that showcased the far-right extremist group’s efforts to keep Republican Donald Trump in the White House at all costs.

A co-defendant — Kelly Meggs, who led the anti-government group’s Florida chapter — was also convicted of seditious conspiracy, while three other associates were cleared of that charge. Jurors found all five defendants guilty of obstruction of an official proceeding: Congress’ certification of Biden’s electoral victory.

The verdict marks a significant milestone for the Justice Department and is likely to clear the path for prosecutors to move ahead at full steam in upcoming trials of other extremists accused of sedition.  As reported by the Associated Press.

Rhodes and Meggs are the first people in nearly three decades to be found guilty at trial of seditious conspiracy — a rarely used Civil War-era charge that can be difficult to prove. The offense calls for up to 20 years behind bars.

It could embolden investigators, whose work has expanded beyond those who attacked the Capitol to focus on others linked to Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland recently named a veteran prosecutor, Jack Smith, to serve as special counsel to oversee key aspects of a probe into efforts to subvert the election as well as a separate investigation into the retention of classified documents at Trump’s Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago.

Garland said after the verdict that the Justice Department “is committed to holding accountable those criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy on January 6, 2021.”

“Democracy depends on the peaceful transfer of power. By attempting to block the certification of the 2020 presidential election results, the defendants flouted and trampled the rule of law,” Steven M. D’Antuono, assistant director in charge of the FBI Washington Field Office, said in an emailed statement. “This case shows that force and violence are no match for our country’s justice system.”

Now the Justice Department has to go after Trump and other high-level enablers of the January 6th insurrection.

Tony

IBL News Review of My Talk on Key Research on Data Analytics and How AI/ML Will Shape the University of the Future! 

Dear Commons Community,

IBL News was good enough to do a brief review of my talk last week at the Online Learning Consortium’s Accelerate Conference in Orlando, Florida.

Below is the entire article.

Tony

———————

Key Research on Data Analytics Shows How AI/ML Will Shape the University of the Future

By IBL News

 

AI and Machine Learning Technologies will make a huge impact on the university business. Specifically, “man-machine interfaces will shape the university of the future, in areas such as academic, administrative, student, and support services.”

This was the main conclusion of a revealing talk by Patsy Moskal (University of Central Florida), Charles Dziuban (University of Central Florida), and Anthony G. Picciano (Hunter College and Graduate Center, City University of New York), which took place in Orlando, Florida, during the 2023 OLC Accelerate conference, last week.

The three presenters [in the picture above] conducted extensive research on data analytics as used in adaptive learning environments and were empowered by emerging data analysis techniques. The substance of this session will be published in Data Analytics and Adaptive Learning: Research Perspectives (Routledge/Taylor & Francis) in early 2023.

Patsy Moskal, Charles Dziuban, and Anthony G. Picciano have published together thirty books and more than 250 articles on these topics.

“AI is impacting everything we are doing at the university; the Future University will be deeply impacted by this technology,” said Dr. Anthony Picciano, professor of Education Leadership at Hunter College and Co-Founder of CUNY Online.

“As data analytics and adaptive learning infused by artificial intelligence develops and matures, the future of education will be shaped,” added Picciano.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ray Schroeder: Time to Consider Your Social Media Options!

Leave, Adapt, Resist – Time to rethink Academic Twitter? | Impact of Social Sciences

Dear Commons Community,

My colleague, Ray Schroeder from the University of Illinois – Springfield, had an article yesterday in INSIDE HIGHER ED, commenting on whether it is time to reconsider our social media options in light of what is happening on Twitter under the ownership of Elon Musk. Below is his entire piece.  Ray raises a timely issue that is on a lot of our minds.

Tony

——————————————————————————————

As higher ed professionals, this is a good time to rethink our social platforms.

Ray Schroeder

November 28, 2022

As of this writing, the future of Twitter is unclear. Elon Musk has taken over the helm with policies and practices that are prompting massive layoffs and resignations that have threatened the regular operation of the social media tool. Some experts are even predicting the demise of Twitter. This has caused concern among a wide range of users from the casual news and entertainment fans to government agencies. Public agencies had come to rely on Twitter for information dissemination and exchange in the case of emergencies. The takeover of Twitter has left them seeking other, more credible, stable and secure, outlets for emergency communication.

I have lost only a few dozen of several thousand followers on Twitter; presumably they have dropped off the platform because of the recent changes. I have found at the same time that my network on LinkedIn has expanded. I have not investigated whether there is a direct cause and effect, but I suspect that Twitter flight is some of the cause. The changes have prompted me to include my LinkedIn and Mastodon addresses in my Twitter profile so that followers who are preparing to leave can find my daily UPCEA-curated reading postings on other social media.

I have found that higher education professionals seek opportunities to inform themselves about news, information and engage their community through social media. This is necessary in order to respond to the fire hose of changes that are triggered daily by technology advancements, as well as the economy and policy changes in impacting higher education. For our professional purposes, we are less interested in memes, animal tricks and music videos. We seek to build vibrant and customized personal learning networks (PLNs) of trusted sources who provide information and engage in discussions that are on relevant topics as they apply to us individually, our institution and our circumstances. These individualized PLNs are also the venues through which we learn about opportunities for career advancement and new career paths.

The most relevant platform for UPCEA, the association for professional, continuing and online education leaders (at which I am a senior fellow), and its members is CORe (Collaborative Online Relationships) that is open to those professionals at the hundreds of UPCEA member institutions. Members raise questions, make announcements, consider collaborations and engage one another on timely topics in many aspects related to professional, continuing and online higher education. Other associations in our field similarly maintain open and/or closed Listservs designed to facilitate dissemination of information and platforms for discussion around their own niches of higher education field. Yet there still is a need for broader-based discussion on the emerging technologies, developing strategic options and the policy and related changes that we face with the public at large.

As we look at our social media PLN options, it would seem that our needs cannot be satisfied by the short video formats that are the stock in trade of TikTok and Instagram. In part, we are looking to build and maintain professional networks, share updates, and stimulate creative discussion on ways to better serve learners and reach new audiences.

What are the alternatives? Fortunately, a number of platforms are available online to meet these needs. A couple of decades ago, I launched curated reading lists with online discussions for students enrolled in my graduate seminars on emerging technologies. I used Blogger, which was originated by Pyra Labs and later taken over by Google (Alphabet). Out of that experience evolved the flagship curated reading list at UPCEA, the Professional, Continuing and Online Education Update. The Blogger tool remains an icon for sharing stimulating ideas intended to foster deeper discussions among professionals. WordPress, Tumblr and Reddit followed, with other similar blogging sites. You can easily search for blogs online to find ones that are active and relevant to your needs. Blogger remains, for me, the anchor of my social media where my curations are held in long-term, searchable format and from which I feed the microblogging sites of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and (now) Mastodon. Each of these sites has its own strengths and shortcomings, so I find that using all of them help to reach a wide-ranging audience across the continents.

Facebook (Meta) has served as an informal network platform for many. Traditionally, Facebook has been a more casual than professional network. It remains to be seen just how the platform will evolve with the advent of a promised metaverse. Perhaps the new environment will give us a wide variety of new tools that can enable academic collaboration and information dissemination.

Mastodon offers the most similar look and feel to Twitter. However, behind the scenes it is a very different enterprise. It is comprised of a federation of open-source, nonprofit servers interconnecting with each other to enable worldwide access. While it has been around since 2016, the number of users had reached one million by the end of October. That number doubled in the past month and continues to grow rapidly.

LinkedIn is more than a site for job seekers. Serious professional discussion and networking take place across the platform. There are numerous relevant groups on LinkedIn which serve specialized interests. For example, the Quality, Innovation and Sustainability in Higher Education Group, with some 12,000 members, is aimed at all profiles of a broad spectrum of participants. Large groups like the Higher Education Management group, with nearly 130,000 members, are designed to discuss administrative and leadership topics. These are just a few of the thousands of different groups communicating via LinkedIn.

Take time to consider your PLN in light of the disruption in Twitter. Are there other social sites that might do a better job of addressing your needs? Now is the time to reassess as Twitter reorganizes and other social networks enhance their offerings.

Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson blasts Trump for hosting white supremacist Nick Fuentes!

Asa Hutchinson - Ballotpedia

Dear Commons Community,

Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson said Donald Trump’s meeting with a white nationalist last week was not “accidental” and that “it shouldn’t happen.”

Trump, who this month announced he was running for president in the 2024 election, hosted a dinner with white supremacist Nick Fuentes and rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, at his Mar-a-Lago resort last Tuesday night.

“You could have accidental meetings. Things like that happened. This was not an accidental meeting,” Hutchinson, the Arkansas governor, said during an interview on CNN’s State of the Union.

Several political leaders have criticized Trump’s dinner with Fuentes, a leader in the far-right movement, and Ye, who has come under fire for antisemitic comments, including David Friedman, Trump’s former ambassador to Israel, and former GOP New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

Hutchinson added that “it’s not a good idea for a leader that’s setting an example for the country or the party to meet with an avowed racist or antisemite.”

“It’s very troubling and it shouldn’t happen,” Hutchinson said. “We need to avoid those kinds of empowering the extremes. When you meet with people you empower, and that’s what you have to avoid. You want to diminish their strength, not empower them. Stay away from them.”

Hutchinson has been the subject of speculation as a possible 2024 presidential contender. The Arkansas governor will give remarks this week at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California.

In a preview of his remarks, Hutchinson said that Republican candidates who disavowed the elections went on to lose their races in the midterm elections. He said he would emphasize that Republicans should “not denigrate our political systems” or “undermine confidence in America.”

When asked about potential 2024 candidates, such as himself or former Vice President Mike Pence, who are positioning themselves as potential alternatives to Trump, Hutchinson said: “It should be in our voice of reality that this is exactly where we are as a party and where we need to go to reach out to those independents and expand the base of the party and move beyond the Trump era.”

The Republican Party needs more leaders like Hutchinson to speak out against Trump and how he represents the GOP.

Tony

When Visiting Michelangelo’s David, Eleonora Pucci Brings a Duster!

Eleonora Pucci at work last week in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, Italy.

Eleonora Pucci at work in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, Italy.Credit…Chiara Negrello for The New York Times

Dear Commons Community,

It is one perk of being the in-house restorer of the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, Italy, where Eleonora Pucci’s task is to regularly dust Michelangelo’s David, which she described recently as exhilarating, if somewhat nerve-racking. As reported by The New York Times.

“To be able to contribute, even in a small way, to the conservation of David’s beauty” makes hers “the best job in the world,” Ms. Pucci said. “Is there anything greater than passing on beauty?”

It was last Monday, the one day the Galleria is closed to the public, and the clanging of metal echoed throughout the museum as a specialized team built a scaffold tower in the airy rotunda that housed the David. Over the course of the morning, the tower would be gingerly repositioned so that Ms. Pucci could reach the 17-foot-high statue from all sides.

Ms. Pucci nimbly scampered up until she was eye to giant eye with the statue that Michelangelo carved from a single block of marble from 1501 to 1504, the first nude colossal statue made since antiquity. The David has called the Galleria home since 1873.

The job begins with a photographic close-up to better track any wear and tear on the statue and to verify how much dust and debris (of microscopic dimension) has settled on it since the last time it was cleaned.

That can change depending on the season, the number of visitors and the kind of clothes they may be wearing. Microscopic fibers can get caught in tiny spider webs among the sculpted locks of the David’s hair. “It’s pretty normal,” Ms. Pucci said matter-of-factly — and all the more reason to ensure that works are constantly monitored.

Then the dusting begins.

As Ms. Pucci says “The statue is not going to dust itself.”

Tony

In Wisconsin, a Merger Can’t Save a Community College – Richland Campus to Close!

UW System to shift degree programs away from Richland campus by fall 2023 | Education | captimes.com

Dear Commons Community,

In 2017 the University of Wisconsin system merged the operations of each of its 13 community colleges with one of seven of its public universities. The move was meant to shore up the finances of the two-year colleges, which, like a growing number of institutions in some parts of the country, were facing persistent enrollment declines and shrinking support from the state appropriations.

But that effort was not enough to save one of the community colleges. The system’s president announced last Tuesday that its campus in Richland Center, Wis., would end instruction for all degree programs. The programs will instead be offered about 60 miles away at the University of Wisconsin at Platteville — the institution the college merged with five years ago — or at another community-college campus.  As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The system remains committed to its branch campuses and providing “as broad of access as possible,” Jay Rothman, president of the system, wrote in a letter to Tammy Evetovich, interim chancellor at the Platteville campus. “There comes a time when financial pressure and low enrollment makes in-person, degree-level academic instruction no longer tenable,” Rothman continued.

The campus won’t necessarily close, Rothman wrote, but may offer only adult education or other nondegree courses. The university must devise a plan to shift the instruction as well as determine what will happen to employees at the small college. Richland Center’s directory page lists 13 faculty members, and a dozen other staff members and administrators.

Even if the degree programs continue at the university, the distance from Richland Center could create a big barrier for current or future students from the area, said Nicholas W. Hillman, professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Online instruction in many programs might also be available, Hillman said, but access to broadband internet is not assured in the state’s rural areas, and some programs that require hands-on experience are just better suited to in-person instruction.

A spokesperson for the Richland Center campus directed questions to the communications officer at Platteville. The spokesperson for Platteville did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the university system provided the president’s letter but declined to make anyone available for comment.

Enrollment at Richland Center has plummeted from 567 students in 2014 to just over a tenth of that number this fall, according to system data. Few colleges have lost students at that rate, but the problems facing the small Wisconsin campus are widespread in the sector.

Community-college enrollment had been on a slow decline, nationally, since 2011, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, and it worsened during the pandemic. In the spring semester of 2022, enrollment was nearly 8 percent less than in the spring of 2021, according to federal data. It had fallen 10 percent the year before.

In addition, a decline in the birth rate after the 2008 recession is expected to hit college enrollment in the middle of the decade, leading to even sharper enrollment losses at many institutions, especially in the Upper Midwest and Northeast. The situation is particularly acute in rural areas, as the population migrates to more urban areas, making it difficult for states to afford a full suite of college majors for a shrinking population.

As a result, campus mergers or consolidations are becoming more common. Among the latest are Vermont, where the state merged the administration of three state colleges, and Pennsylvania, where the state system of higher education is consolidating six of its 14 universities into just two entities.

But the ending of instruction at Richland Center shows the limitations of such efforts, Hillman said. While enrollment declines are a problem, Wisconsin also has not done a good job of coordinating the academic offerings between the state’s 16 technical colleges, 14 universities, and 13 community colleges.

“These are problems that will keep happening,” Hillman said, “without a statewide plan or coordination across agencies.”

Below is an excerpt of an announcement from Wisconsin Chancellor Mark A. Mone

I was alerted to this development by Tanya Joosten, a colleague of mine at the University of Wisconsin –  Milwaukee.

Tony

—————————————————————————

Dear Faculty, Staff and Students,

UW System has announced that, due to its low enrollment, it is asking UW-Platteville to repurpose its Richland branch campus. Planning is underway to help transition the approximately 60 students there to UW-Platteville’s Baraboo or main campus or any other UW System campus.

I realize this news may be of concern to you. Please know that this action is not linked to other campuses and that we support and continue to invest in our UW-Milwaukee branch campuses. Our Waukesha and Washington County campuses have much more robust enrollments. We are investing in them because they provide valuable services in these communities and are important in our efforts to provide educational opportunities across the southeast Wisconsin region….

Mark A. Mone

Chancellor

 

Trump faulted for dinner and praise for rapper Ye and extremist Nick Fuentes!

Donald Trump, Nick Fuentes and Kanye West

Trump, Fuentes, and Ye

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump this week praised his dinner guest Nick Fuentes, one of the most prominent young right-wing extremists in the nation, according to a report Friday in The New York Times

Trump on Tuesday night had dinner with Nick Fuentes, an outspoken antisemite, and the performer Kanye West, who has also been denounced for making antisemitic statements. Karen Giorno — a veteran political operative who worked on Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign as his state director in Florida —  confirmed that Mr. Fuentes was there.

The former president reportedly announced that he liked Fuentes after hearing him describe himself as a member of Trump’s base who liked when Trump went off the cuff during speeches. (A source told Axios that Trump said he “really” liked Fuentes.)

“He gets me,” Trump said of Fuentes, the Times and Axios both reported.

Trump’s advisers reportedly urge him to stick to the speeches as written; he occasionally sparked chaos when ad-libbing during his time as president.

Axios’ unnamed source commented that he didn’t believe “the president knew who the hell [Fuentes] was.” Trump made a similar statement after news of the meeting was made public.

Fuentes had showed up alongside Ye — the rapper formerly known as Kanye West — to meet Trump at his Mar-a-Lago golf resort in Florida on Tuesday. Sources confirmed the meeting to outlets like Axios and Politico.

Ye’s career has bounced from crisis to crisis after a series of antisemitic tirades recently got him kicked off Twitter and dropped from major corporate partnerships.

“Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, was asking me for advice concerning some of his difficulties, in particular having to do with his business,” Trump wrote Friday on Truth Social, the platform he founded after getting banned from Twitter in early 2021.

“Anyway, we got along great, he expressed no anti-Semitism, & I appreciated all of the nice things he said about me on ‘Tucker Carlson [Tonight].’ Why wouldn’t I agree to meet?” Trump wrote, referring to the Fox News program.

Fuentes, a white supremacist, has prompted outrage after cropping up alongside other prominent Republicans in the past, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia and Rep. Paul Gosar from Arizona ― both of whom later sought to distance themselves from Fuentes.

Trump also said on Truth Social that he discouraged Ye from announcing a 2024 presidential run while the two met. Trump’s own 2024 campaign is less than two weeks old.

Ye, however, announced his candidacy Thursday on Twitter with a video in which he partially described the dinner, stating that Trump had said something derogatory about Kim Kardashian, Ye’s ex-wife.

The rapper’s Twitter account had been reinstated earlier this month under the leadership of new CEO Elon Musk. It was also on the platform that Ye posted a screenshot of a text thread purportedly between himself, right-wing agitator Milo Yiannopoulos, Fuentes and another individual whose name was blurred out.

Fuentes attracted public attention during the Trump years as the founder of an extremist youth group called America First who espouses hateful views that are especially hostile to people of color, women and Jewish people. He has at various times stated that segregation was better for Black Americans and minimized the Holocaust by questioning how many people were killed, comparing them to cookies baking in an oven.

Fuentes also participated in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Directly after the event, which left one woman dead, Fuentes praised it as “incredible,” writing on Facebook that the “rootless transnational elite knows that a tidal wave of white identity is coming.”

Scores of Republicans chastised Trump for hosting Fuentes after news of the dinner leaked. David Friedman, who served as Trump’s ambassador to Israel, stated:

“To my friend Donald Trump, you are better than this. Even a social visit from an antisemite like Kanye West and human scum like Nick Fuentes is unacceptable,” Friedman wrote in a tweet. “I urge you to throw those bums out, disavow them and relegate them to the dustbin of history where they belong.”

Yesterday, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a potential 2024 rival, also denounced antisemitism, without directly referencing the dinner or the president under whom he served.

“Anti-Semitism is a cancer,” Pompeo wrote, adding: “We stand with the Jewish people in the fight against the world’s oldest bigotry.”

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie commented

“He can’t stand not having attention all the time,” Christie told The New York Times, speaking about Trump. “And so, having someone show up at his club — even if it is  Nick Fuentes — and want to sit with him, feeds the hunger he feels for the attention he’s missing since he left the presidency.”

Trump, Ye, and Fuentes deserve each other  but they have no place in our government!

Tony

Kevin McCarthy likely to face a floor fight for Speaker of the House!

Kevin McCarthy confronts growing opposition from Republican ranks

Kevin McCarthy

Dear Commons Community,

Republican leader Kevin McCarthy is struggling to secure the 218 votes he needs to be elected speaker of the House of Representatives in January.

Because voters this month handed the GOP a wafer-thin majority, just a small bloc of conservative rebels could deny the California Republican the speaker’s gavel at the start of the new Congress. Already, several McCarthy foes have declared they will not vote for him under any circumstance.  As reported by NBC News.

“He doesn’t have the votes,” said Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., a leader of the conservative Freedom Caucus. “Some of the stages of grief include denial, so there will be some denial and then there’ll be the stage of bargaining where people are trying to figure out … will there be some kind of consensus candidate that emerges.”

It’s put McCarthy in a precarious position: He’s will have to win his party’s nomination for speaker while fighting for his political life.

In this game of chicken, if the conservatives don’t blink and McCarthy refuses to back down, it could result in a chaotic floor fight with House members taking multiple votes for speaker — something that has not happened in a century.

Another example of fight for the speaker’s  position was in 2013, when the tea party movement that had swept Ohio Republican John Boehner into the speaker’s office turned on Boehner himself.

A band of 20 conservative rebels — furious that Boehner had ousted some of them from committees and cut a fiscal deal that raised taxes on the wealthy — huddled in a Capitol Hill apartment the night before the speaker’s vote and plotted a coup against their own leader, according to author Tim Alberta’s book, “American Carnage.”

Among those in the room were Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., Raul Labrador, R-Idaho, and Tim Huelskamp, R-Kansas, Alberta writes. Republicans had won 234 seats in the 2012 election; if 17 Republicans opposed Boehner, they argued, conservatives could prevent him from getting the 218 votes he needed to remain speaker.

But some suspected there were Boehner spies in the room, and the conservatives began pointing fingers at each other, according to Alberta. Labrador said they actually needed to secure 30 dissenters because Boehner would surely be able to flip some of those no votes, telling the group, “We need 30 to get to 17 because half of the people in this room are going to cave tomorrow.”

Labrador was right. When their names were called on the House floor the next day, some involved in the plot got cold feet and did not vote, voted present or cast their ballot for Boehner. In the end, only 12 Republicans refused to support Boehner.

Two years later, Boehner suffered 25 GOP defections in the speaker vote — the largest number of defections in 100 years — but he would easily win the speaker’s gavel with 216 votes due to a number of members missing the vote; Democrats had attended the funeral of former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo and several other lawmakers couldn’t get to Washington due to bad weather.

In September 2015, Boehner announced his resignation, after a conservative rabble-rouser, Rep. Mark Meadows, filed a “motion to vacate the chair” that would have forced yet another floor vote on the unpopular speaker.

We will have to wait and see what McCarthy and the Republicans will do! It is likely that the GOP will control 222 votes in the House of Representatives.   Republicans already have won 220 races and the two that are undecided lean  Republican.

Tony

Here Are the Last 2 Congressional Races We Are Waiting On!

Every single vote counts": U.S. House race maintains razor thin margin between  Duarte, Gray in CA-13 - CBS Sacramento

Dear Commons Community,

While Republicans officially won control of the House of Representatives in this month’s midterm elections, more than two weeks later we still don’t know the extent of the GOP majority.

Two races remain too close to call: California’s 13th District, between Republican John Duarte and Democrat Adam Gray, and Colorado’s 3rd District, between right-wing extremist Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert and Democrat Adam Frisch.

The Republican candidate is leading in each race at the moment. 

Duarte is leading Gray by 593 votes, while Boebert is ahead by 554, according to The Associated Press.

Going into Election Day, the California race in the newly redrawn district had been ranked as a “toss-up” by the Cook Political Report.

The tight race in Colorado was a surprise given polling showed Boebert “clearly favored” to win the race, according to polling aggregator site FiveThirtyEight.

Frisch has already called Boebert to concede, even though an official recount is likely to be triggered given the thin margin of victory. In Colorado, a race qualifies for an automatic recount if the margin between the top two contenders is at or below 0.5 percent of the leading candidate’s total vote.

Republicans had hoped President Joe Biden’s low approval rating combined with voters’ dissatisfaction with high inflation and Democratic policies would usher in a “red wave” that didn’t materialize in the midterms.

Democrats maintained control of the U.S. Senate. A runoff race in Georgia between Sen. Raphael Warnock (D) and Republican Herschel Walker on Dec. 6 will determine whether Democrats will control 51 seats.

We wait and see!

Tony