GOP better start acting more like Conservatives and then they would win more.
With all but two out of 593 precincts reporting, Democrat Conor Lamb clings to an 847 vote lead over Republican Rick Saccone in the special election in Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District.
Lamb has 111,875 votes to Saccone’s 111,028 votes, according to the Pennsylvania Secretary of State’s website as of 11:30 p.m. Tuesday.
Allegheny County’s absentee ballots are included in that count, but the absentee ballots in the three other counties in the district have yet to be counted: 1,195 in Washington County, 1,808 in Westmoreland County, and 203 in Greene County, for a total of 3,204 absentee ballots yet to be counted.
To pull out the victory, Saccone will need to get a little over 60 percent of these ballots.
The absentee ballots will be counted and reported in these three counties between 11:15 p.m. eastern and an undetermined time on Wednesday morning.
“It’s probably going to take us several hours,” to count, the election director in Washington County told CNN at 11:15 p.m. eastern.
The Westmoreland County election director told CNN their votes will be counted and reported around midnight.
“I would rather be in Conor Lamb’s shoes right now than Rick Saccone’s,” former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA), who once represented this district in the House of Representatives, told CNN.
Congress to vote on Trump- and NRA-backed bill to remove local gun restrictions
Legislation would force all states to recognize gun-carrying permits from any other state and faces challenges in the Senate, but is expected to pass the House
On the day of an annual vigil in Washington DC that honors the victims of American gun violence, congressional Republicans are expected to vote on a Trump-endorsed bill that would eviscerate local gun restrictions, removing states’ power to control who is allowed to carry a concealed, loaded handguns in their streets.
Officials in New York and Los Angeles warn that the legislation would allow an unknown numbers of tourists – perhaps hundreds of thousands each year – to carry concealed handguns into America’s densest urban areas, including Times Square and the New York City subway. Big city police chiefs across the county have spoken out against the bill, calling it a law enforcement enforcement nightmare.
The bill, which is the National Rifle Association’s “number one legislative priority” has prompted a renewed battle over states’ rights, with Democrats for once arguing against the power of the federal government, and Republicans hoping to use that federal power to undermine local control.
The NRA-backed legislation would force all states to recognize gun-carrying permits from any other state, including the dozen states that generally do not require any training or permit to carry a gun, a policy called “constitutional carry”.
West Virginia’s choice to allow “constitutional carry” of concealed handguns “might be fine for West Virginia, but it’s not fine for New York City”, said Cy Vance, Manhattan’s district attorney. “I wouldn’t presume to tell West Virginia, as a New Yorker, what West Virginia’s laws should be with regard to gun possession. Can you imagine how mad they’d be?”
Donald Trump endorsed the legislation during his campaign last year.
The bill faces an uphill battle in the Senate, but it expected to pass the Republican-controlled House easily on Wednesday, the same day that gun violence survivors, including residents of Newtown, Connecticut, will be visiting congressional offices to ask politicians, once again, to take some action on gun control.
Nearly five years after the 2012 Newtown school shooting, which left 26 children and educators dead, Congress has yet to pass any gun control laws.
“We have nothing but heartache and compassion for the victims of Sandy Hook, but concealed carry reciprocity has nothing to do with this tragedy,” said Tatum Gibson, a spokesperson for Richard Hudson, the North Carolina Republican congressman who introduced the legislation, said in a statement when asked about the timing of the vote.
“I don’t know that putting the NRA’s agenda on the floor of the House is the right way to mark five years since Sandy Hook,” Connecticut senator Chris Murphy, one of the leading Democratic gun control advocates, told the Guardian. “It is heartbreaking to think as we come up to the fifth anniversary of Newtown, Republicans in the House are pushing through a bill to make our country less safe.”
Republicans’ attempt to tear down local restrictions on gun carrying comes just weeks after two of America’s deadliest mass shootings, at a country music concert in Las Vegas and a tiny church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. The move highlights the stark divide in Americans’ opinions on guns, with some conservatives seeing increased civilian gun carrying as a way to prevent or lessen the toll of mass shootings, even as many other Americans are trying to fight against America’s gun-carrying culture and get guns off the street.
Under current law, states have dramatically different standards for who is allowed to carry a concealed, loaded weapon. A handful of more liberal states give law enforcement officials discretion when granting a carry permit and some require that applicants demonstrate a specific need for self-defense. But the majority of states make it easy for citizens to get a carry license. While some states require that permit holders demonstrate proficiency with a gun at a firing range, others only require some kind of gun safety course. In Virginia, applicants don’t even need to leave the house: it’s possible to get a concealed carry license after taking a gun safety course online.
Many states currently recognize each other’s carry permits, in the same way states recognize each other’s driver’s licenses, but some states pick and choose which licenses they will honor, and a few states, including New York, recognize no outside permits at all.
Gun rights advocates say the current patchwork of state laws governing gun carrying is confusing for law-abiding gun owners, and that American states and cities with the toughest gun control laws are violating Americans’ constitutional right to carry firearms for self defense.
Opponents of the legislation say the right way to fix the confusion over differing regulations is to create a uniform national standard for training and eligibility, not simply force the states with the toughest gun control regulations to allow the most untrained, unvetted gun carriers to walk their streets.
Adam Winkler, a gun law expert at the University of California Los Angeles, said the legislation the House is currently considering would also allow local residents in cites with tough restrictions to do an end run around local laws, and get their permit to carry a gun from another state with weaker laws. One of the proposed Democratic amendments to the bill would close that loophole.
An estimated three million Americans report carrying a loaded handgun on a daily basis, and an estimated nine million report doing so on a monthly basis, according to a recent study based on a survey conducted by Harvard and Northeastern researchers.
New York City has 46 million domestic visitors a year, said Vance, Manhattan’s district attorney. If the legislation passed and even a small percentage of those tourists brought their guns with them, “We’re talking about a likelihood of hundreds of thousands of guns coming into New York City each year from states with little or no requirements for gun ownership.”
If passed, the legislation “would escalate the danger for residents every day,” Los Angeles city attorney Mike Feuer said.
“The fact that the same people who promote states’ rights and local control would be trying to ramrod this bill through Congress – this bill that undermines states’ rights at every turn, that eviscerates common sense protections in states throughout the United States – it’s the height of hypocrisy.”
GOP preps contempt resolution for top FBI, DOJ officials after missed Monday deadline
The House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday will begin writing a resolution holding top FBI officials in contempt of Congress after the agency missed a Monday deadline to turn over key evidence the committee has been seeking for months.
“We are moving forward with the contempt resolution,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., told the Washington Examiner Tuesday morning. He added that the panel is still negotiating with FBI and Justice Department officials to get the requested documents.
Nunes has accused the FBI and Department of Justice of a “months-long pattern … of stonewalling and obstructing this committee’s oversight work.”
Those accusations boiled over during the weekend, after stories were leaked to the New York Times and Washington Post saying that FBI agent Peter Strzok, a key investigator in the Trump-Russian probe, was removed from the Russia probe after exchanging text messages critical of Trump to another FBI agent he was involved with romantically. Republicans had been seeking information about why he was removed, but were never told anything by FBI or Justice Department directly.
Nunes had also been seeking information about the FBI and Justice Department’s use of the Steele dossier, which contains damning but unverified information about President Trump.
But the Strzok leak was the last straw, and Nunes announced Saturday he has ordered committee staff to begin drafting a contempt of Congress citation for Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and for FBI Director Christopher Wray unless they complied with the panels’ requests for information by the close of business on Monday.
After the story broke, Nunes said, the FBI and Justice Department agreed to make some of the witnesses available, but are still withholding many documents and other evidence the Intelligence panel is seeking, an aide said.
Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores said the department has given the panel hundreds of pages of classified documents and multiple briefings, and has now allowed Strzok and FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe to meet with the panel.
While committee aides will start writing the contempt resolution Tuesday, Nunes has not set a date for the panel to consider the contempt charges.
If approved by the committee, the resolutions of contempt would be sent to the House floor for consideration, but only if Speaker Paul Ryan chooses to bring them up. One GOP source said Ryan supports the contempt resolution.
Contempt of Congress resolutions approved by the House are referred to the the Justice Department, but they are relatively rare.
The House voted in 2012 to hold then U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for withholding documents sought by the House Oversight Committee on the DOJ’s “Fast and Furious” operation that resulted in thousands of U.S. guns ending up in the hands of Mexican drug dealers.
These resolutions also are not always effective. For example, the Justice Department elected not to prosecute Holder over the contempt charge.
George W. Bush Bashes Cheney, Rumsfeld: ‘They Didn’t Make One F****** Decision’
Former President George W. Bush went off on his former vice president and defense secretary, stating bluntly that “they did not make one f****** decision.”
Bush made the inflammatory remark about his former colleagues in Mark K. Updegrove’s book The Last Republicans: Inside the Extraordinary Relationship Between George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, which is scheduled to be released November 14.
The 43rd president pushed back against critics who claim he did not make major decisions during his presidency, and that former Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made most of the important decisions in the White House.
They “didn’t make one f****** decision,” Bush claimed. “The fact that there was any doubt in anyone’s mind about who the president was, blows my mind.”
Updegrove’s book describes the relationship between the younger Bush and his father, but his book is making headlines ahead of its November 14 release.
Other excerpts from the book that are already public quote both former presidents making disparaging statements about President Trump.
The elder Bush attacked Trump’s leadership style and called the current president a “blowhard.”
The younger Bush also made his disdain for Trump known recently in an October speech at the George W. Bush Institute, where he rejected Trump’s ideology and defended globalism.
Help! I’m an old black man trapped in a little white boy’s body
Mitch McConnell’s Former Chief of Staff Calls Steve Bannon a ‘White Supremacist’
Mitch McConnell’s former chief of staff Josh Holmes grew increasingly desperate to stop the rising wave of populist candidates challenging the Senate Republican leadership by calling former White House chief strategist and Breitbart News executive chairman Steve Bannon a “white supremacist.”
Holmes said, “In 2018 we ought to revisit this question and find out if these people are still happy to be associated with Bannon. When you’re facing voters, I’d take one of the most successful majority leaders in history over a white supremacist any day.”
Holmes’ and the establishment Republicans’ influence in the 2018 Senate election continues to fade. Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley, whom Holmes’ labeled as their first choice for the 2018 midterm election, refuses to endorse Mitch McConnell for majority leader.
“He was our No. 1 recruit of the cycle,” Holmes charged. “We worked our tail off to recruit Josh Hawley.”
Hawley’s spokesman, Scott Paradise, responded in an email questioning whether Hawley would back McConnell.
“The Senate is broken and failing the people of Missouri,” Paradise said.
“Josh is running because he is not willing to tolerate the failure of the D.C. establishment any longer,” Paradise added. “He won’t tolerate Claire McCaskill’s failure. And he won’t tolerate Republican failure, either.”
Montana state auditor Matt Rosendale recently tweeted a picture with Steve Bannon and said that he will end the “D.C. status quo.”
Nearly two dozen Senate Republican candidates refused to openly back Mitch McConnell for majority leader.
Holmes’ statement echoed Sen. Sherrod Brown’s (D-OH) recent comments. Brown also called Bannon a “white supremacist.”
Andy Surabian, a former White House adviser and now a senior adviser to the pro-Trump super PAC Great America Alliance, said, “No amount of smearing can change the fact that not a single U.S. Senate candidate was willing to go on the record and say that they supported Mitch McConnell for Majority Leader. Everyone can see right through the clearly desperate, unfounded and pathetic attacks coming from McConnell Incorporated.”
