Crooked Media - Cease and DeSantis

- Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), a real normal guy’s-guy. A man of the people, if you will.

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) is not having a good summer—we love to see it!
 

• Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has frankly had way too many shake-ups in his presidential campaign staff for someone who hopes to overtake disgraced former president Donald Trump’s staggering 40-plus-point lead. Maybe it has something to do with his poor judgment and being a cold-blooded reptile. Who’s to say? Anyhow, the Super PAC Never Back Down, which has been supporting DeSantis’s candidacy, has begun to scale back its ambitions for later-state operations and is instead focusing solely on states that vote earlier in the Republican presidential primary. 
   

• But Never Back Down has changed course in an early voting state, as well. The group has ended door-knocking operations in Nevada, which will hold its primary on February 8. It’s also pulled field operations out of California, which has a glut of delegates that anyone in the GOP field would need to take on Trump. Since launching his campaign back in May, DeSantis has struggled to gain traction against Trump, despite the fact that many Republican voters thought he “won” the first primary debate (we’re not sure which debate they were watching, because it could not have been the one we saw).
   

• After months away campaigning, DeSantis is having some trouble in his home state of Florida as well. He cut a few campaign stops short this week to deal with the aftermath of a racist shooting in Jacksonville, and with Hurricane Idalia, which made landfall on the Gulf Coast of the state. For the first time since he launched his campaign, DeSantis’s governing duties have had to take precedence. DeSantis was booed as he spoke to mostly-Black mourners in Jacksonville, and his response to Hurricane Idalia has yet to be fully realized, but for now he is working with President Biden on disaster relief despite Biden being his favorite punching bag on the campaign trail.

One absolutely crucial GOP voting bloc that doesn’t seem to care much for DeSantis is White evangelicals. 
 

• Team DeSantis is essentially resting all of its hopes on Iowa and New Hampshire. Unfortunately for him, that means White evangelicals as far as the eye can see. For someone like DeSantis, whose administration has been responsible for injecting so much overt Christianity into Florida’s public institutions, this should be a layup. But White conservative evangelicals remain devoted to Donald Trump (we get it; the man screams holiness). DeSantis is nominally Catholic, which in and of itself raises suspicions among some evangelicals, but he also hasn’t been able to connect with them the way some other conservative Catholic politicians like Rick Santorum and Marco Rubio have in the past. DeSantis isn’t even clicking with other Catholics. His draconian views on immigration and the death penalty contradict official church teachings. 
   

• He also doesn’t seem to be a practicing Catholic (join the club) or understand what kind of Catholic he is. He called the sacraments—a core Catholic practice of how the Church believes God interacts with humanity—“nice.” Nice??? My guy. The American Catholic vote is typically split between Democrats and Republicans already, so you gotta do better than that. Two of the creepiest guys in the GOP field, Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) and former Vice President Mike Pence, have evangelical bona fides for days (competing for who can hate abortion and LGBTQ folks more), and both quoted scripture during the debate. Scott cited Ephesians 3:20 to call for “break[ing] the backs of the teachers unions,” exactly as it was meant to be used!

From the outset, Ron DeSantis has campaigned on his “record as Governor.” That record seems both uncompelling to Trump-obsessed GOP primary voters and actively frightening to everyone else. A perfect blend for electoral success!

Abortion is on the ballot yet again in 2023. In Virginia, we’ve got to maintain a majority in at least one chamber of the legislature against “totally moderate suburban dad” Glenn Youngkin’s anti-abortion agenda, while Ohioans are voting to codify reproductive freedom in the state constitution. Visit votesaveamerica.com to see how you can get involved and learn more, now. And while your browser’s already open- head to crooked.com/store to check out shirts like “bodily autonomy”, “bros for roe” and more so you can be the most stylish volunteer out there.

According to a disclosure form released on Thursday, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has copped to accepting flights on a private jet last year, and justified them by citing “security concerns” following the leak of the  Dobbs decision. The 2022 trips were provided by, you guessed it, Texas billionaire Harlan Crow. Thomas and his brother-in-terrible-jurisprudence Samuel Alito filed their disclosure forms more than two months after the Court’s seven other justices’ disclosures were released in June. ProPublica published a series of reports this summer detailing Thomas’ failure to disclose luxury trips, tuition for his grand-nephew, and real-estate transactions involving Crow. In the Thursday filing, Thomas finally disclosed the 2014 sale to Crow of his mother’s house and two other houses owned by Thomas and his family members in Savannah, GA. Thomas said his omission of the transaction in prior financial disclosure forms was “inadvertent.” Sure thing! Life-tenured Supreme Court justices still have no binding code of conduct for gifts and donor largesse that would get any other federal official immediately fired and possibly subject to criminal prosecution. Love that for us.

Attorney General Steve Marshall (R-AL) filed a motion on Monday asserting that Alabama can prosecute people who help women travel out of state for abortion, blowing off a lawsuit from the ACLU and Yellowhammer Fund. Sounds pretty unconstitutional to me!! 

Saudi Arabia’s “counterterrorism” tribunal sentenced a retired teacher to death based solely on his Twitter and YouTube activity, a serious escalation of the Saudi government’s crackdown on freedom of expression and peaceful political dissent. 

The U.S. Army announced on Wednesday that it has brought sexual-assault charges against 37-year-old military doctor Maj. Michael Stockin in a blockbuster case involving at least 23 alleged victims. 

GOP donors are weirded-out that Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) isn’t married. We’re weirded out by everything else about him. 

Disgraced former president Donald Trump told lawyers working for Attorney General Letitia James (D-NY) that he was too busy doing “the most important job in the world” and “saving millions of lives” from “nuclear holocaust” to commit fraud. Nice try, pal, but if the last 8 years have taught us anything, it’s that Donald Trump is never too busy to commit fraud.

As summer draws to a close we find ourselves weeks away from yet another looming government shutdown, thanks to our ever-demented friends in the GOP. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who has already almost caused the government to default on its debt this year, is scrambling to avert another embarrassment in a sequence of truly impressive embarrassments for someone who has only been Speaker for less than eight months. McCarthy made the case to his frothing caucus of miscreants that a government shutdown would make it more difficult for House Republicans to continue pursuing their sham impeachment inquiry against President Biden. This move shows how desperate McCarthy is to get his far-right flank to suspend their opposition to a stopgap spending measure needed to continue funding the government beyond the end of the fiscal year on September 30, like he’s pleading with toddlers who don’t want to go to bed. So far, many members of the far-right Freedom Caucus don’t seem to be biting, including Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT) who said he and his fellow nutjobs are, “not going to be distracted by shiny objects.”

What A Day readers,
 

This is important. Governor Greg Abbott and Governor Ron DeSantis have been attempting to strip their constituents of their civil liberties. In Texas and Florida, Abbott and DeSantis have signed bills that severely limit abortion access, censor free speech and expression, threaten the lives of asylum seekers, and more. The ACLU is doing everything in our power to fight back, but we need your support. Add your name today to join the fight to protect the rights of people in Texas and Florida.

Right now in Texas, we are working on lawsuits that fight Governor Abbott’s attempts to:

• Remove transgender youth from their parent’s custody
• Suppress the right to vote 
• Prohibit the transport of some immigrants within the state of Texas
• Ban drag performances
• And more

And in Florida, we’re in court fighting Governor Desantis’ efforts to:

• Ban books largely written by non-white and LGBTQ authors
• Rewrite history by censoring educators and prohibiting classes like AP African American History
• Ban abortion care
• Silence civic organizations’ voter registration efforts
• And more

We’ll never stop using our resources to fight for civil liberties. Join the ACLU and tell Governor Abbott and Governor DeSantis: Texans and Floridians do not deserve to live in fear. Stop threatening their constitutional rights.

If you sign up today, you’ll receive updates on these cases, and more breaking news alerts about our work all across the country.

Thanks for taking action,

Team ACLU 

Proud Boys leader Joe Biggs has been sentenced to 17 years in prison for his actions on January 6, among the lengthiest sentences yet for a convicted insurrectionist. 

Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) has rejected calls from MAGA nutjobs to convene a special legislative session to impeach Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, and warned Republicans against abusing their power to remove her in any other way. 

The Federal Reserve’s metric of underlying inflation posted the smallest back-to-back increases since late 2020, strengthening beliefs that the U.S. economy can avert a recession.