Lindsey Graham Reveals Outrageous Position on Election Results

Republicans apparently haven’t cast aside the possibility of overturning another election.

At least two top GOP lawmakers have felt the need to add caveats to statements affirming that they’ll embrace the outcome come November, including the former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Lindsey Graham.

“Will you accept the results of the 2024 election no matter who wins?” prompted MSNBC’s Meet the Press host Kristen Welker on Sunday.

“Yeah, I’ll accept them if there’s no massive cheating,” Graham said. In the same breath, Graham specified that he “accepted 2020” as a measure of his commitment to accepting election outcomes, even though he clearly hasn’t let go of the outcome enough not to buy in a little to his party’s election interference scandal.

Meanwhile, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance fully committed to accepting the results of the general election—so long as Trump is the victor.

“Look Dana, I fully commit to accept the results of 2024. I think that Donald Trump will be the victory,” Vance told CNN’s Dana Bash. “If it’s a free and fair election, Dana, I think every Republican will enthusiastically accept the results. And again, I think that those results will show that Donald Trump will be reelected president.”

Conservatives have insisted—without evidence—that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump since he refused to concede to President Joe Biden’s victory. The scandal resulted in a slew of criminal charges for Trump and his allies in their efforts to undermine elections in swing states such as Arizona and Georgia. Simultaneously, news outlets that aired the baseless allegations, including Fox News and Newsmax, are under the gun for historic defamation lawsuits by voting machine companies. The gamut of lies has been thoroughly debunked, but Republicans attempting to curry favor with the presumptive GOP presidential nominee continue to double down on it.

The Texas Supreme Court ruled Friday that an El Paso woman who gave birth despite supposedly receiving a tubal ligation can’t sue her medical provider because “society views a healthy child’s arrival as a net boon and a gift.”

The nine-member court, whose members are all Republican, ruled unanimously that Grissel Velasco could not seek damages from Dr. Michiel Noe and his medical practice, Sun City Women’s Health Care, for medical expenses, physical and mental harms, and the costs of raising her now 8-year-old girl.

“Texas law does not regard a healthy child as an injury for which a parent must be compensated but, rather, as a life with inherent dignity and profound, immeasurable value,” wrote Justice Rebeca Huddle.

Under Texas law, a parent could only recover damages, such as medical expenses, from during the pregnancy, delivery, and afterward—nothing more, Huddle said.

Huddle cited the fact that Noe had reimbursed Velasco $400 for the cost of the tubal ligation, a sterilization procedure in which a woman’s fallopian tubes are cut and tied to prevent pregnancy, and that her pregnancy was covered by the federal Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Velasco’s lawyer, Jose Lopez, said in a statement that the ruling had “taken away a patient’s voice and choice and has immunized the negligent doctor from civil liability.”

The ruling fits right along with Texas’s extreme laws on abortion, which include a near-total ban passed in 2021. Last summer, a group of women sued the state over the law and one woman vomited while telling the story of how she was forced to give birth to a baby that died shortly after delivery.

Anti-abortion activists in the state want to execute women and minors who seek abortions or in-vitro fertilization. And the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, has threatened to prosecute doctors and hospitals for carrying out abortions, even if a court orders one out of health concerns. All of this seems to indicate a forced birth-or-else policy in the state.

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem is no longer welcome in 16 percent of her home state.

The MAGA Republican has been banned from the territories of five of the nine Sioux tribes in her state for derogatory comments she made at a town hall in March, accusing the community of failing their children.

“Because they live with 80 percent to 90 percent unemployment,” Noem said at the time. “Their kids don’t have any hope. They don’t have parents who show up and help them. They have a tribal council or a president who focuses on a political agenda more than they care about actually helping somebody’s life look better.”

On Tuesday, the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate Tribe became the fifth tribe to pass a resolution barring Noem. They join similar actions taken by the Oglala, Cheyenne River, Standing Rock, and Rosebud Sioux tribes, which have so far banned the state’s executive leader from 13,000 square miles of land—approximately 90 percent of the state’s Indigenous-owned territory.

“As tribal leaders, it is our duty to honor the voice or the wishes of our people, and that’s who we work on the behalf of,” Sisseton Tribal Chairman J. Garrett Renville told local station KELO. “The people at this time would like that in place until there was a formal apology.”

Native tribes have had a strained relationship with Noem since she took office in 2019. Since then, Noem and South Dakota’s Indigenous population have disagreed over the construction of the XL Keystone pipeline and the removal of Native American histories from South Dakota’s education standards. Noem also violated the tribes’ sovereignty during the Covid-19 pandemic, undermining tribal efforts to enact lockdowns and quarantine zones while the state’s infection count skyrocketed.

“Governor Noem claims she wants to establish meaningful relationships with Tribes to provide solutions for systemic problems. However, her actions as Governor blatantly show otherwise,” the Rosebud Sioux Tribe said in a news release in April after issuing their own ban.

Noem doesn’t seem to have a lot of backers in her corner anymore. The South Dakota governor alienated millions of Americans when she revealed in her latest book, No Going Back, that she shot and killed her puppy. Some of the people disgusted with the canine execution included some of her strongest allies, including Donald Trump, who has reportedly removed Noem from his shortlist of candidates to become his vice president over the anecdote.

If Trump wins the 2024 presidential election, Republicans and conservatives want criminals to die—literally. 

Project 2025, a coalition of conservatives and Republicans, released a document last year laying out its policy wish list for all of the government. Hidden deep within the playbook, on page 554, is a plan to execute every inmate on federal death row—and add more criminals to it with the help of the Supreme Court, HuffPost reported Friday. 

Right now, there’s a federal moratorium on executions that was restored shortly after Biden’s election. The Trump administration had ended it in 2019 with the first federal execution in nearly 13 years and the tacit approval of the Supreme Court. The federal government would execute 13 inmates before Trump’s term ended, the most in a single year since 1896. Now it seems the rest of the GOP plans to pick up where the Trump administration left off. 

The next administration should “do everything possible to obtain finality” for every prisoner on federal death row, which currently includes 40 people, says the plan, written by Gene Hamilton,  a former official in Trump’s Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security.

“It should also pursue the death penalty for applicable crimes—particularly heinous crimes involving violence and sexual abuse of children—until Congress says otherwise through legislation,” Hamilton continues, writing in a footnote that this could require a new Supreme Court ruling, “but the [Justice Department] should place a priority on doing so.”

It’s unclear if Trump will strictly abide by this conservative playbook. The fact that he has trouble articulating his plans coherently suggests that it’ll be up to the people he surrounds himself with. If he appoints Cabinet members who are longtime Republican operatives, or even hard-right advisers such as Stephen Miller, it seems likely. 

Donald Trump is—once again—trying to backpedal on his opinions about TikTok.

The presumed GOP presidential nominee is trying to argue that it wasn’t conservatives who originally pushed to ban the popular social media platform, but rather President Joe Biden.

“Just so everyone knows, especially the young people, Crooked Joe Biden is responsible for banning TikTok,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, before cooking up a novel conspiracy that Biden is removing American access to the platform in a bid to help one of its social media rivals, Facebook.

“He is the one pushing it to close, and doing it to help his friends over at Facebook become richer and more dominant, and able to continue to fight, perhaps illegally, the Republican Party. It’s called ELECTION INTERFERENCE,” Trump said.

It’s at least the third instance in which Trump has conveniently forgotten how hard he fought during his own administration to ban the Chinese-owned app. Long before Biden signed the effective ban—which is purportedly about national security—into law, Trump attempted to eradicate TikTok via an executive order before he left office in 2020. He claimed that the video-sharing platform “[threatened] the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.”

And the flipped script comes at an opportune moment for the presidential candidate. Major Republican donor Jeff Yass, whom Trump appears to be courting, reportedly owns a 15 percent stake in TikTok. Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort, who is reportedly trying to rejoin Trump’s team, has new business ties to the Chinese media industry.

Another of Trump’s allies, former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, revealed his own plans to acquire the social media company via an investor group just a day after the ban passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in the House.

“I think the legislation should pass, and I think it should be sold,” Mnuchin told CNBC in March. “It’s a great business, and I’m going to put together a group to buy TikTok.”

ByteDance announced shortly after Biden signed the ban—which gave TikTok an ultimatum to either sell its I.P. to an American owner or stop operating within the U.S.—that the company doesn’t “have any plans to sell.”