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When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ new surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, strolled into Sen. Tina Polsky’s office two weeks ago and refused to wear a mask, who’d have thought that the senator would be the one at the center of hate calls and death threats?

Polsky asked Ladapo to don a mask as she is currently in treatment for breast cancer. 

Although Polsky’s gotten a lot of hate calls lately, the call she got most recently was one of the most vile: antisemitic, crude, profanity-laden, and menacing—in other words, a typical Republican tirade when their beliefs are being challenged.

The call lasted about a minute and the unidentified woman caller ended it with, “F**k off and die.” Nothing but the best from the GOP and its supporters. 

Polsky says the worst part is that since the incident with Ladapo in her office, DeSantis has said nothing. 

“The humanity is gone, the compassion is gone, and unfortunately, our leaders do nothing to stop it,’’ Polsky said Wednesday. “They’re picking it up from our leaders and he [DeSantis] needs to stop it. I work for the State of Florida, just like he works for the State of Florida. He doesn’t care about me at all. He had many opportunities.” 

As Miami Herald reported, DeSantis did appear on Fox News with host Laura Ingraham to say that Polsky’s grievance about his anti-mask, anti-vaxxer surgeon general was “manufactured,” and she was “using it to get political air time on Comcast and AT&T.” Classy, governor. Very classy. 

“He just doesn’t care about anyone or anything but his presidential ambitions,’’ Polsky told the Herald. “The governor, the surgeon general, and certainly not these trolls, don’t get to tell me where I’m comfortable and where I feel safe. That’s up to me to decide.”

Florida Senate Leader Wilton Simpson excoriated Florida’s top doctor for his insensitive and irresponsible behavior in the meeting with Polsky.

“It shouldn’t take a cancer diagnosis for people to respect each other’s level of comfort with social interactions during a pandemic,” he said. “What occurred in Senator Polsky’s office was unprofessional and will not be tolerated in the Senate.”

Ladapo, a cardiovascular specialist and lover of hydroxychloroquine, says he can’t “communicate clearly and effectively” with his mouth covered. So I guess he was mute during all the time he worked at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, supposedly caring for patients.

The last time I checked, you need to wear a mask in a hospital around sick people. Did Ladapo miss that class at Harvard Medical School?

Of course, Ladapo’s statement didn’t provide an apology, just an excuse. Why wear a mask? It’s not as if COVID-19 has killed over 58,000 people in Florida. And, there’s always “thoughts and prayers,” the go-to for the GOP. Here’s Ladapo’s version:

“I am genuinely saddened by Senator Polsky’s recent diagnosis of breast cancer, and I pray for her and her family and wish them God’s blessings and strength,” Ladapo tweeted.

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The House is ready to vote on President Joe Biden’s signature care economy and infrastructure proposals Friday. Maybe. While the first vote of the day (a Republican nuisance motion to adjourn) was ongoing, Speaker Nancy Pelosi was still whipping for conservative Democratic votes from the Sabotage Squad. Now that the Congressional Progressive Caucus is enthusiastically supporting both bills—the Build Back Better (BBB) human infrastructure and climate bill and the bipartisan hard infrastructure (BIF) proposal—the saboteurs are coming up with more and more excuses to delay.

If nothing else, it demonstrates just how clever the progressives were to insist on the two bills being linked. The conservative Democrats and their Senate counterparts and cheerleaders Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have proven untrustworthy. They’ve been trying to renege on the deal for the linked votes for months, with the only aim seeming to be preventing the larger care economy and climate change plan from passing. The moderates have been demanding a thing that leadership says won’t happen for a few weeks—a Congressional Budget Office score. They already have a Joint Committee on Taxation score to work with, and the Senate will make changes, and thus the CBO score on this package won’t be final anyway. It’s all just seeming like the saboteurs are back to making up reasons not to pass this bill.

That the bad faith in these negotiations is centered in that group of conservative Democrats is made even more evident by the concession of a bloc of lawmakers fighting for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants that would not be included in this bill.

“This is just the battle. This isn’t the end of the war when it comes to immigration,” Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, a California Democrat, said following Thursday’s meetings with leadership. “There are so many things in this bill that will benefit immigrant families that we just can’t lose it all because of this one issue.”

The bad faith from the so-called moderates looks even worse after they negotiated new language on SALT, the deduction for state and local taxes. The deduction was eliminated in the 2017 tax bill, a pointed punishment for people living in blue states like New York and California, which have the highest state and local taxes, particularly property taxes on ridiculously expensive homes. The moderates got higher SALT cap included in the bill, a condition of New Jersey Democrat Josh Gottheimer, which already mainly benefits the rich. They voted to raise the SALT cap from $10,000 to $ $80,000 per year. By the way, the Democrats pushing for that are also the Democrats who want to see a CBO score right now—but their changes mean the CBO will have to take longer to do its work. Funny how that played out, huh?

Another conservative Democrat who has been fighting against Medicare being able to negotiate drug prices also got a win Thursday. Rep. Scott Peters of California further whittled down the narrow drug price negotiating powers given to Medicare in the bill by delaying the provision by another year for some categories of drugs. The bill previously would only allow Medicare to negotiate prices on 10 select drugs by 2025, and 20 per year by 2028, and only for drugs that are outside the “exclusivity” period—the time in which the Food and Drug Administration allows them a monopoly on the drug.

That means some of the most expensive drugs can’t be negotiated. So-called “orphan drugs,” those generally very expensive drugs used to treat rare illnesses, are also exempted from negotiations, as are drugs from “small biotech” firms, though their exemption expires in 2028. It’s not clear which category Peters and crew got further carved out.

And yet they’re still holding out. Maybe this will help:

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If it seems that things are proceeding slowly when it comes to the House select committee on Jan. 6, that’s because they are. It took until June for the committee to be formed. Document requests went out in August. The first subpoenas were issued a month later. Steve Bannon was held in contempt of Congress a month after that. 

Now it’s November. No one has been indicted. None of the four subpoenaed in September have testified. Rep. Liz Cheney may have revealed that the committee has now interviewed over 150 people, but without knowing who those people are or what they’ve said, it’s hard to estimate how much progress the committee may have made toward holding those responsible for the January insurgency responsible. From the outside, the answer certainly looks like “not much.”  

One of the most frustrating aspects has to be that the committee is still fighting to see the documents it requested back in August. Donald Trump immediately tossed a claim of executive privilege over two large tranches of those documents. Almost as quickly, President Joe Biden removed that barrier, which might make it seem that the documents were then hand-carried to the select committee. Except they weren’t. Because Trump took his executive privilege claims to court, claiming that his former role still carries the right to cover up. 

What Trump is trying to hide includes: the White House visitor logs for the week of Jan. 6, call logs to Trump and Mike Pence on that day, draft public statements created during the assault on the Capitol, and handwritten memos passed around the White House as Trump responded to the scenes of his supporters storming Congress. All of which sound pretty important to the committee’s investigation.

On Thursday, it seemed that Trump had a bad day in court, but that’s a bit deceptive. Any day this matter is still in court is a good day for Trump.

As someone who has been involved in over 3,000 lawsuits, Trump has one area of genuine expertise: using the courts to slow down any process. As Politico noted back in October, Trump sued both the Jan. 6 committee and the National Archives to halt the release of over 700 pages of documents with a claim that the committee’s request was “a vexatious, illegal fishing expedition.” At the core of the suit is a claim that the committee lacks a “legislative purpose” in seeking the documents which, according to the suit, makes the entire request “unconstitutional.”

In Thursday’s testimony, CNN reports that D.C. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan appeared to be “skeptical” of Trump’s claims and pressed his attorneys over why there should be any protection of the requested documents.

“Are you really saying that the President’s notes, talking points, telephone conversations, on January 6, have no relation to the matter on which Congress is considering legislation?” Chutkan asked. “The January 6 riot happened in the Capitol. That is literally Congress’ house.”

That doesn’t mean the day was a complete sweep for Team Congress. Chutkan also acknowledged that some of the documents being requested, like internal polling data from Trump’s campaign, appeared to be “tangential” to the actual investigation and that “there has to be some limit” to what the committee can request. At various points during the day, Chutkan noted that Congress’ requests were “very broad” or even “alarmingly broad.”

All of this could play into a request from Trump’s team that the district court review the documents one at a time, allowing challenges to each—a task that Chutkan noted would take “years.” But with the judge also acknowledging that some of the documents didn’t seem to have direct value for the investigation, there’s a danger that such “this one, but not this one” consideration could begin, turning every page of the documents into its own unique court fight.

Trump’s team understands they don’t have to win. They’re only doing what they did so well during past congressional investigations: stalling. No matter what the district court says, there is always the court of appeals, and no matter what that court says, there’s always the Supreme Court. All of them separated by weeks or months.

Without some kind of expedited consideration, it’s not at all difficult to contemplate these same documents being the subject of a Supreme Court ruling issued well into 2022. It’s also not difficult to contemplate that the court’s Trump-centric majority might discover that most of what the committee requested was out of bounds, or even that Congress can only request documents having to do with some existing piece of legislation—a ruling that would strongly restrict Congress’ ability to check the executive branch going forward. 

How long can this all take? Congressional requests to see Trump’s tax records—an authority explicitly granted under federal tax regulations—is still wading through the courts. These are the documents Congress ordered the IRS to turn over in 2019. Back in July, it seemed that this issue was finally resolved when the Department of Justice reversed course and stopped trying to block the release. Yeah, but … it’s not over. At an August hearing, the Department of Justice argued that the documents should be produced “promptly.” Congress is still waiting.

Trump isn’t trying to win in court. Being in court is the win. If Congress actually hopes to make significant progress on the Jan. 6 investigation before the 2022 elections, it will likely have to come without the documents Trump is protecting. 

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In a shock to absolutely no one, Richard Spencer serving as his own lawyer has proven pretty terrible for, well, Richard Spencer. The glass-jawed Nazi known for barely being able to take a punch (among other undesirable traits) was forced to represent himself in a civil lawsuit after his real lawyer dropped Spencer for failing to pay up and adhere to his legal advice.

Spencer has spent a full week pretending he has any grasp of the law as one of 25 defendants who had a hand in the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. Surprisingly, he is just one of two overconfident white dudes representing themselves in this case, the other being Christopher “Crying Nazi” Cantwell.

Cantwell’s had his fair share of bafflingly stupid moments, including losing his own witness list and preparing for trial by watching Tucker Carlson, but Spencer’s idiocy outshone him on Thursday. Over the course of a full day in the witness stand, Spencer was endlessly smacked down by his own words as attorney Michael Bloch pulled up transcripts and audio clips pushing back against the many denials Spencer offered for his own behavior.

Unicorn Riot’s live tweets of Thursday’s proceedings provide an incredible account of Spencer getting in his own way. His role as a witness absolutely undermined his own ability to successfully make a case for himself as his own lawyer.

The Sines vs. Kessler civil lawsuit was brought forth on behalf of nine Charlottesville residents who were injured during the “Unite the Right” rally and surrounding events. They’re hoping to receive compensatory and statutory damages from the defendants, whom they allege conspired to incite violence. Spencer certainly helped make the plaintiffs’ case today. Spencer spent hours perjuring himself in an effort to distance himself from his conduct before, during, and after the rally.

Bloch, who represents the plaintiffs, pulled up frequent instances in which Spencer either outright called for violence or agreed with someone else who did. James Kolenich, the white nationalist attorney representing many of the folks named as defendants, later took the time to throw Spencer under the bus on behalf of his clients during cross-examination. The lawyer pushed a theory that Spencer attempted to take over an alt-right organization in the run-up to the rally and played more of an active role in the “Unite the Right” event than he let on. As if that weren’t enough, Kolenich also brought up an instance in which Spencer’s credit card was declined for a $4 purchase.

Proceedings concluded with Cantwell just beginning to cross-examine Spencer, which Cantwell will continue doing on Friday. The trial initially began on Oct. 25 and is calendared for four weeks, according to the civil rights nonprofit Integrity First for America. Spencer likely won’t earn any accolades for being an amateur lawyer, a la Ted Bundy, but he certainly found one hell of a way to become the alt-right’s new favorite scapegoat.

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Imagine for a moment House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy leisurely sipping on his morning coffee when he suddenly sees the news that the select committee investigating Jan. 6 has interviewed more than 150 people already in their probe.

Fun, right? That heart-attack-inducing moment may have actually occurred Thursday when Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming dropped a bomb.

“We’ve had, actually, over 150 interviews with a whole range of people connected to the events, connected to understanding what happens, so that just gives you a sense,” Cheney, the panel’s vice-chair, told Politico. “It is a range of engagements—some formal interviews, some depositions … There really is a huge amount of work underway that is leading to real progress for us.”

In other words, the Jan. 6 panel has been burning through witnesses even as they face reluctance from a handful of holdouts close to Donald Trump. It’s been known that the committee has interviewed some Trump officials, like former Trump White House aide Alyssa Farah and former Trump Department of Justice officials like Jeffrey Clark and Richard Donoghue. But by the sounds of it, the committee’s work is proceeding urgently and at a break-neck pace. As the other GOP member of the Jan. 6 panel, Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, noted last weekend on ABC’s This Week, Republicans will surely kill the Jan. 6 probe if they retake control of the chamber in next year’s midterms.

The Justice Department has yet to act on a two-week-old criminal referral from the House for Steve Bannon after defying a congressional subpoena. That surely hasn’t helped the committee’s bid to secure testimony from other Trump confidants, including former chief of staff Mark Meadows, former deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, and former national security and Defense Department aide Kash Patel.

But the committee’s efforts could soon be getting a real boost nonetheless in the form of a treasure trove of information from the National Archives. Trump has sought to block congressional investigators from obtaining key call records, visitor logs, and sensitive files of his inner circle. But the federal judge who heard arguments in Trump’s legal challenge Thursday, Judge Tanya Chutkan, appeared to take a very skeptical view of his executive privilege claim.

President Joe Biden has repeatedly rejected Trump’s assertion of executive privilege. Politico reports that unless the court intervenes, Archivist David Ferriero plans to ship the first batch of information to lawmakers on Nov. 12.

A rejection of Trump’s privilege claim could also light a fire under the Justice Department on the matter of Bannon’s criminal referral. Bannon has also claimed he is shielded from complying with investigators based on executive privilege, but his claim is even weaker than Trump’s is. So an official rejection of Trump’s claim by Judge Chutkan could deal a final blow to Bannon’s already flimsy argument in the eyes of Justice Department officials.

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The Justice Department is suing Texas over the voter suppression law signed by Gov. Greg Abbott in September, following its lawsuit against Texas for the punitive abortion ban that went into effect in September.

“Our democracy depends on the right of eligible voters to cast a ballot and to have that ballot counted,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. “The Justice Department will continue to use all the authorities at its disposal to protect this fundamental pillar of our society.”

The lawsuit charges that parts of Texas Senate Bill 1 violate Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act by making it harder for people who have disabilities or cannot read or write to vote. Under the Texas law, people would be barred from offering assistance to those voters to, for instance, answer questions about the ballot, clarify translations, or check to be sure that a visually impaired person’s ballot matches their intent. Additionally, the Justice Department says the Texas law violates Section 101 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by requiring elections officials to reject mail ballots and mail ballot request forms for mistakes that “are not material to establishing a voter’s eligibility to cast a ballot.”

“The Civil Rights Division is committed to protecting the fundamental right to vote for all Americans,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in a statement. “Laws that impair eligible citizens’ access to the ballot box have no place in our democracy. Texas Senate Bill 1’s restrictions on voter assistance at the polls and on which absentee ballots cast by eligible voters can be accepted by election officials are unlawful and indefensible.”

The Justice Department’s complaint addresses only some parts of the sweeping Texas law, which also bans 24-hour voting and drive-thru voting—both of which were disproportionately used by voters of color in 2020—as well as giving partisan poll watchers new powers to intimidate voters and election officials. The Justice Department also weighed in on supporting a lawsuit brought by other groups to challenge SB 1 on racial discrimination grounds.

Abbott was predictably defiant on Twitter, also predictably without addressing the substance of the complaint.

The Justice Department previously sued Georgia over its massive voter suppression law. Both lawsuits are likely to run into the Trump-packed courts’ hostility to voting rights.

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“This is a low, low point in the history of this body,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer declared Wednesday afternoon, after Senate Republicans again blocked voting rights legislation. On this vote, only Alaska’s Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski broke ranks. Just 15 years ago, on July 20, 2006, the Senate passed the Voting Rights Act reauthorization unanimously. Every Republican—including current Sens. McConnell, Grassley, Shelby, Inhofe, Collins, Cornyn, Graham, Burr, Thune—voted for it.

For some unknowable reason, Democrats Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin believe those nine senators are still willing to strengthen voting rights. Remarkably, they seem to believe that by continuing to allow them to have the filibuster, Republicans will be thankful and extend the hand of bipartisanship instead of using that filibuster to make sure Republicans can pass state voting laws to ensure Democrats never have a majority in Congress or can gain the White House again. After 11 months of Republicans spitting on that hand of friendship, they’re keeping it out there. Maybe they’re masochists. Maybe being humiliated again and again by Republicans is more fulfilling to them than restoring democracy.

The two are essentially standing alone. Noted moderate Sen. Tom Carper, of Delaware, made that clear Thursday in an op-ed in The News Journal. “Right now, in statehouses across the country, state legislators are enacting a wave of voting restrictions with the sole purpose of making it harder to vote,” Carper writes. “In this year alone, 19 states have enacted 33 laws to restrict voting, oftentimes specifically targeting Black Americans. Meanwhile, many elected officials are embracing the Big Lie as justification to strip away voting rights and weaken our non-partisan electoral process.”

“This is wrong. In response, Congress must act with the same urgency as it did in 1965,” Carper continues. “I do not come to this decision lightly, but it has become clear to me that if the filibuster is standing in the way of protecting our democracy then the filibuster isn’t working for our democracy. […] No barrier—not even the filibuster—should stand in the way of our sacred obligation to protect our democracy.” Carper might, just might, be someone Manchin would listen to, so one would hope that Carper is indeed talking to him and not just to the rest of us. Because pretty much everyone else who matters has been convinced. Sinema is unlikely to want to stand alone if Manchin turns—she’s got the most electorally to worry about.

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Schumer’s floor speech on Wednesday also pointed the way and tailored a message for Manchin. “This is an old, old fight in this chamber. Over 100 years ago, the great Senator of Massachusetts, Henry Cabot Lodge, said that ‘to vote without debating is perilous, but to debate and never vote is imbecile.’” Not that he’s calling Manchin an imbecile, but, well. Anyway, “To vote without debating is perilous, but to debate and never vote is imbecile,” Schumer continued.

“We should heed those words today, and explore whatever paths we have to restore the Senate so it does what its framers intended: debate, deliberate, comprise, and vote.” The focus on debate suggests that Schumer is working on a talking filibuster reform, which is far more than reasonable. “This is too important,” Schumer continued, then inching toward filibuster reform. “We will continue to fight for voting rights and find an alternative path forward, even if it means going at it alone, to defend the most fundamental liberty we have as citizens.”

He’s said “everything is on the table” before, multiple times. Maybe this time, since he said it on the Senate floor right after Manchin’s 10 good people on the Republican side failed to show, maybe this time it’s real and he’s actively trying to make it happen.

Maybe President Joe Biden is helping, or at least open to it. Remember he said last month, “We’re going to have to move to the point where we fundamentally alter the filibuster,” adding that it “remains to be seen exactly what that means in terms of ‘fundamentally’—on whether or not we just end the filibuster straight up.”

Biden said he was worried about losing “at least three votes” on the Build Back Better reconciliation package if he started whipping on the filibuster now. That was an exaggeration—only Manchin and Sinema would possibly try to pull that one.

At this point, just because of that reconciliation bill and then funding the government and raising the debt ceiling and churning through the record-breaking judicial nominations, another stab at voting rights and at eliminating the filibuster—even if just for the issue of voting and elections reforms (along with the 161 other filibuster carve-outs) isn’t imminent. But it still needs to be fast-tracked, and with it, not just the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, but also the Freedom to Vote Act Republicans blocked a few weeks ago.

Democracy can’t wait much longer.

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The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, Carolyn Fiddler, and Matt Booker, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.

Leading Off

● NC Redistricting: North Carolina’s Republican-run legislature passed new congressional and legislative maps on Thursday, meaning they are now law because redistricting plans do not require the governor’s approval under state law. All three are extreme GOP gerrymanders designed to lock the party into power for years to come, despite the state’s perennial tossup status.

With North Carolina gaining a seat due to redistricting, the congressional map would create 10 safely red districts and just three that would be safely blue, with one swing seat currently held by a Democrat that’s been trending hard to the GOP. By comparison, the map used in last year’s elections—which Republicans had to repeatedly redraw thanks to intervention by the courts—sent eight Republicans and five Democrats to D.C.

Note that the map has been entirely renumbered, so we’ve put together our best assessment of where each current incumbent might seek re-election at this link, while statistics for past elections can be found on Dave’s Redistricting App. Below are some of our key take-aways:

• GOP lawmakers sought to pack as many Democrats as possible into just three ultra-Democratic districts based in Charlotte (the 9th) and the region known as the Research Triangle (the 5th in Raleigh and the 6th in Durham/Chapel Hill). By doing so, they’ve ensured that nearly all of the surrounding districts will remain safely Republican.
• By contrast, they cracked the blue cities of the Piedmont Triad into four separate districts that sprawl across the state into unrelated rural areas, even though Republicans united the Piedmont in a single district after a state court blocked their prior map as an illegal partisan gerrymander in 2019.
• This includes splitting Democratic Rep. Kathy Manning’s home county of Guilford between three districts, stranding her in a dark-red 11th District with GOP Rep. Virginia Foxx. This region’s cities of Greensboro, Winston-Salem, and High Point in particular have a large Black population that was previously united in Manning’s district but is now split four ways under the new map.
• Republicans also chopped up the Sandhills, a politically swingy region that includes Fayetteville and rural counties to its west and south along the state’s border with South Carolina that have large Black and Native populations (particularly the Lumbee tribe). The area, which was split between two districts under the previous lines, is now divided between three, all of which are majority white and Republican.
• The lone competitive seat would be the 2nd, which is home to Rep. G.K. Butterfield, an African American Democrat. The district, which takes in a heavily Black stretch of North Carolina’s rural north as well as some Raleigh exurbs, would have voted 51-48 for Joe Biden, compared to Biden’s 54-45 margin in Butterfield’s current district, the 1st. But the trendlines here have been very unfavorable for Democrats, and Butterfield could very well lose in a tough midterm environment.
• Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn’s seat (now numbered the 14th) would move a little to the left, though it would still have gone for Donald Trump by a 53-45 margin, compared to 55-43 previously. It would have gone for Republican Dan Forest by a narrower 50-48 margin in last year’s race for governor, but few North Carolina Democrats in recent years have enjoyed the electoral success that Gov. Roy Cooper has.
• Given the double-bunking of Manning and Foxx, it’s difficult to say which district qualifies as North Carolina’s “new” seat, but both the 4th and 13th would be open, solidly red seats. The 7th will be open as well, though were GOP Rep. Ted Budd not running for the Senate, that’s where he’d likely seek re-election.

No state has seen more litigation over redistricting in the past decade than North Carolina, and that’s not going to change: A new lawsuit has already been filed in state court over the legislative maps. The chief attack on maps centers on the fact that Republicans say they ignored racial data in drawing their lines, in contravention of the Voting Rights Act, with Republicans baselessly claiming that the VRA no longer applies. Democrats may also find success in once again challenging the map on the grounds that it engages in impermissible levels of partisan gerrymandering, a practice that state courts ruled violates the state constitution’s guarantee of free and fair elections in 2019.

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P.S. Why can’t North Carolina governors veto redistricting plans? It turns out that until 1997, they couldn’t veto anything at all! This state of affairs, however, rankled Republicans, who would occasionally win the governorship even though Democrats always held the legislature. That finally changed after Republicans took the state House in 1994 and, together with Democratic Gov. Jim Hunt, pressed Democratic lawmakers to support a gubernatorial veto.

Democrats relented, but they demanded a carve-out for redistricting—likely figuring they’d regain their lock on the legislature even if the governorship would still sometimes fall into Republican hands. A 1996 amendment to add veto power to the state constitution passed by an overwhelming 3-1 margin.

Democrats, however, misjudged badly: While they retook the state House in 1998, Republicans narrowly won several state Supreme Court races that year and in 2000 heading into redistricting. The court then struck down Democrats’ legislative gerrymanders before the 2002 elections, resulting in relatively nonpartisan maps that helped Republicans capture both chambers of the legislature in 2010, giving them total control over the remapping process despite the fact that Democrats held the governor’s office during both this redistricting cycle and the last one. (However, Democrats now hold a 4-3 majority on the court).

Redistricting

● AL Redistricting: Republican Gov. Kay Ivey has signed Alabama’s new congressional and legislative maps, a day after lawmakers in the GOP-run legislature gave them their final approval. The congressional plan preserves the state’s current delegation—which sends six Republicans and one Democrat to Congress—by leaving in place just a single Black district, the 7th. Alabama could, however, easily create a second district where Black voters would be able to elect their preferred candidates, given that African Americans make up nearly two-sevenths of the state’s population, but Republicans have steadfastly refused to. Two lawsuits have already been filed on this issue.

● DE Redistricting: Democratic Gov. John Carney has signed Delaware’s new legislative maps, just a day after they were passed by lawmakers. Democrats currently control both the state House and Senate and will almost certainly remain in charge in this solidly blue state that voted for native son Joe Biden 59-40 last year.

● NH Redistricting: New Hampshire Republicans have released a draft congressional map that, as they’ve been promising since they re-took control of state government last year, gerrymanders the state’s two House seats to make the 1st District considerably redder.

New Hampshire’s congressional boundaries have changed remarkably little in the 140 years since the state dropped from three districts to two ahead of the 1882 elections, but the GOP’s plan would impose a dramatically redrawn gerrymander that would shift the 1st from a seat that supported Joe Biden 52-46 to one that backed Donald Trump about 50-48. (The 2nd would become heavily contorted and correspondingly bluer.) The end-goal is to oust sophomore Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas—either at the ballot box, or by convincing him not to seek re-election.

Governors

● MA-Gov: Charlie Baker has been playing a game of “Will he or won’t he?” all year long, and the game’s not about to end: Asked once again this week whether he’ll seek a third term next year, Massachusetts’ Republican governor would only say, “We’ll get back to you guys soon on this, I promise.” NBC Boston’s Katie Lannan points out that when Baker formally kicked off his first (and so far only) re-election bid in 2017, he did so on Nov. 28 of that year, but he bristled when asked whether he might follow a comparable timeline this fall, saying, “I don’t understand why you’re in such a big hurry for me to make a decision about this.”

● NE-Gov: Former Republican Gov. Dave Heineman, who previously said he’d “take most of the rest of the summer and the fall” to decide whether he wants to seek his old job, has now pushed his timetable off further, saying he won’t make up his mind until “probably early January.”

House

● MT-02: Former state Rep. Tom Winter, who’d reportedly been considering a bid, said this week that he’ll run for Montana’s new 2nd Congressional District. Last year, Winter campaigned for what was then the state’s lone, at-large House seat but was defeated in the primary by 2018 nominee Kathleen Williams in a 89-11 landslide. The contours of Montana’s congressional map have yet to be finalized, but both Democrats and Republicans on the state’s bipartisan redistricting commission have proposed lines that would divide the state into an eastern district and a western one. The commission must decide on a final map by Nov. 14.

● TX-35: Austin City Councilman Greg Casar announced on Thursday that he’ll run in the Democratic primary for Texas’ 35th Congressional District, an extremely gerrymandered seat that gathers in as many Democratic voters as possible by linking Austin and San Antonio via a thin rail that runs along Interstate 35. Casar is the first Democrat to kick off a campaign, but several other notable candidates are eyeing the race. The 35th is open because Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett, who represents its current iteration, recently said he’d run in the new Austin-based 37th District, which Republicans created to serve as a Democratic vote-sink.

● TX-37: Democratic state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, who hadn’t ruled out a bid for Texas’ new 37th District, says she’ll run for re-election to the legislature instead. So far, the only person running for this safely blue seat in Austin is Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett, who currently represents the 35th.

Legislatures

● NJ State Senate: Conservative Democrat Steve Sweeney, who has served as president of New Jersey’s Senate since 2010, has lost in a major upset to Republican Edward Durr, a truck driver who reported spending a total of $153 on his campaign. The AP called the race on Thursday morning for Durr, who won by a 52-48 margin. Sweeney, however, has yet to concede, saying he wants to wait until all votes are counted.

Despite the loss, many Democrats—and progressive activists in particular—will be happy to see Sweeney gone, particularly since the party retained control of both chambers of the legislature in Tuesday’s elections. With two races uncalled, Democrats have won 23 seats and Republicans 15 in the Senate, while each party leads in one more district apiece. If those leads hold, that would represent a minimal change from the 25-15 advantage Democrats enjoyed heading into the election. The Assembly remains safely in Democratic hands as well, though with a somewhat reduced majority.

Sweeney has long opposed many progressive priorities, earning the ire of teachers’ unions and repeatedly crossing Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy. But the most salient factor in Sweeney’s defeat is probably that he’s the lone Democratic senator to sit in a district that Donald Trump carried. Trump’s 50-48 margin in the 3rd District was, in fact, quite similar to Durr’s.

But while Sweeney’s collapse may have come as a shock, it’s no surprise that Durr has a history of bigoted postings online—which seem to have only emerged after Election Day. Given the lean of his district, though, none of that may matter to his political future.

Mayors

● Atlanta, GA Mayor: Former Mayor Kasim Reed conceded in his comeback bid to once again run Atlanta on Thursday, falling just short of the second slot for the Nov. 30 runoff. City Council President Felicia Moore finished first in Tuesday’s officially nonpartisan primary with 41%, while City Councilman Andre Dickens surprisingly edged out Reed 23.0% to 22.4% for the crucial second-place spot, a margin of just over 600 votes. In a statement acknowledging his loss, Reed did not endorse either candidate.

Obituaries

● Former Gov. Ruth Ann Minner, who in 2000 became the first woman elected to serve as governor of Delaware, has died at the age of 86. Minner was a legislative staffer when she first won a seat in the state House in 1974 as a local version of that year’s “Watergate babies”—reform-minded Democrats elected in the wake of Richard Nixon’s resignation. She later rose to the state Senate, then in 1992 was tapped by Rep. Tom Carper as his running-mate during his successful campaign for governor and served as lieutenant governor for eight years.

Minner sought the top job herself when Carper faced term limits in 2000, easily winning the race to succeed her old boss. (That same year, Carper was elected to the Senate.) Her final contest was by far the closest of her career, a 51-46 win over Republican Bill Lee in 2004.

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It’s not looking too good for the U.S. leading the world on the climate front. President Biden announced some measures at the recent COP26 climate conference but not what he hoped to unveil. The centerpiece of the climate portion of Biden’s Build Back Better agenda has been gutted.

. . . All thanks to one Democratic senator who has made millions in the coal business. West Virginia would reap much more benefit from the Biden agenda than from propping up an industry that has been dying for years. Unfortunately for the planet and countless species on it, Senator Joe Manchin made around $500,000 from the coal business just last year.

U.S. climate leadership around the world and legislation at home is being blocked by one compromised senator from West Virginia. At this point, it looks like the fate of the globe rests in the hands of one selfish coal fiend from a town with a population of 375 people.

Be sure to also visit me over on Patreon, where you can support my work, see behind-the-scenes videos and get prints!

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EJ Dionne/WaPo:

Democrats have only themselves to blame

There was only one good thing for Democrats in Tuesday’s elections: A defeat so comprehensive and disastrous does not leave room for excuse-making, blame-shifting or evasion.

President Biden and his party can respond with urgency, or they will surrender the country to a Republican Party still infected by Trumpism.

Tory Gavito and Adam Jentleson/NY Times:

Republicans Are Going to Use Dog Whistles. Democrats Can’t Just Ignore Them.

Before Tuesday night, conventional wisdom held that racially coded attacks could well spur higher white turnout but that those gains would be offset by losses among minority voters. Mr. Youngkin proved this assumption false. He significantly outperformed other Republicans among white voters, especially women: In 2020, Joe Biden beat Mr. Trump among white women in Virginia by 50 percent to 49 percent, but according to exit polls, Mr. Youngkin beat Mr. McAuliffe among them by 57 percent to 43 percent. At the same time, Mr. Youngkin suffered no major drop-off among minority voters — if anything, he appeared to slightly outperform expectations.

This should terrify Democrats. With our democracy on the line, we have to forge an effective counterattack on race while rethinking the false choice between mobilizing base voters or persuading swing voters.

These results support the ‘folks are fed up with incumbents’ hypothesis.

Noah Lanard/Mother Jones:

New York Cabbies’ Hunger Strike Ends With a Huge Victory

Mayor de Blasio agreed to slash drivers’ crippling debts.

In a course reversal, de Blasio has agreed to have the city serve as a backstop for the debt past administrations loaded onto drivers. That will allow the cabbies, many of whom still owe more than $500,000, to reduce their debts to $170,000 at most. Their loan payments will also be capped at about $1,100 per month. So far, the agreement covers drivers who owe money to Marblegate, which became the largest holder of medallion loans after the bubble burst.

Ronald Brownstein/Atlantic:

What Democrats Need to Realize Before 2022

And how the president’s party fell victim to history

The Republican victory in the Virginia gubernatorial race and the unexpectedly close result in New Jersey’s—both states Biden won comfortably last year—don’t guarantee a midterm wipeout for Democrats in 2022. Rather, the sweeping Republican advance in both states more likely previews the problems Democrats will have next November if the political environment doesn’t improve for Biden.

Huffpost:

Brad Raffensperger Refused Trump’s Attempt To Steal Georgia. Now He’s Doomed.

Raffensperger’s primary campaign, against a promoter of Trump’s lies, offers a view of the GOP’s anti-democratic future.

Brad Raffensperger believes Republicans can win elections by promoting an “uplifting vision for the country.” The Georgia secretary of state is a national name because he pushed back on former President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, and refused Trump’s repeated attempts to “find” votes to overturn the results.

Brad Raffensperger is also politically doomed.

He is seeking reelection in Georgia, where a crowded field of primary candidates have lined up to dethrone a man now considered public enemy No. 1 by adherents of the MAGA movement. Almost nobody thinks he can win.

“He’s dead in the water,” Jay Williams, a Georgia GOP consultant, told HuffPost.

Zachary D Carter/Atlantic:

The Democratic Unraveling Began With Schools

Republican victories in Virginia show how COVID-19 has fundamentally changed American politics.

The unraveling began at the schools. COVID-19 has been terrible for everyone, and it has been especially hard on parents. Unpredictable school closures didn’t just screw up parents’ work schedules; they drove millions of parents, including 3 million women, out of the workforce altogether. Remote learning doesn’t work well for most kids and has been accompanied by rising levels of depression and anxiety among students. From April to October last year, the nationwide share of doctor visits that were related to mental health spiked 24 percent for kids ages 5 to 11, and 31 percent for kids ages 12 to 17. Existing disparities in learning got worse, with the biggest hits coming to kids with disabilities, kids from low-income families, and kids from Black and Latino families—all demographics that Democrats expect to do well with at the ballot box.

Most students in Northern Virginia public schools went almost a full year without in-person schooling, and both teachers and teachers’ unions pretty consistently supported keeping the schools closed in the name of public health. Whether these decisions were ultimately reasonable is hard to measure—but the governor was largely absent on school policy at a time when a lot of parents were really angry.

Greg Sargent/WaPo:

Why did the Democratic coalition fracture so quickly?

“We’re going to see an army of mini-Youngkins in 2022 running the parental control playbook in attempt to tap into anxiety over local schools,” Leopold told me. “Voters are anxious, including over schools — and every Democratic candidate needs a plan to address that.”

In truth, all these factors probably played some role. But I confess to being taken by surprise at how quickly the Democratic coalition frayed, only one year after coming together against Trump.

All of which suggests two very unsettling conclusions.

The first is that Republicans appear to be reaping the positive consequences of the deep polarization along educational lines unleashed by Trump while evading the negative ones.

…

Which leads to another point. If this result does signal a Democratic loss of the House and possibly the Senate in 2022 — and GOP strength in the New Jersey gubernatorial race also underscores this — we may be staring at the third time a Democratic president had a window of only two years to clean up a major mess left behind by Republicans.

Very interesting thread, you can also see it here.