Pennsylvania Supreme Court Throws Out Votes as Senate Recount Begins

The recount for Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate race won’t count undated or incorrectly dated mail-in ballots, a major blow to voting rights.

In an opinion filed Monday, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that ballots that failed to arrive with a correct handwritten date on the return envelope, and thereby failed to comply with the requirements of the state election code, would not be included in the final vote tally in the race between Senator Bob Casey and his Republican opponent, Dave McCormick.

McCormick was deemed the winner of the race nearly two weeks ago, nabbing 48.9 percent of the vote with 99 percent reporting compared to Casey’s 48.5 percent. As the week wore on and Pennsylvania’s various counties continued to tally their ballots, it became evident that the competitors were separated by fewer than 23,000 votes. By Monday, that number had dwindled to 17,000 out of almost seven million ballots that had already been recounted, reported the Associated Press.

Democratic-controlled election boards in three counties—Montgomery, Philadelphia, and Bucks Counties—had argued that an incorrect date said nothing about the voter’s eligibility to cast their ballot.

The Republican National Committee and the Pennsylvania Republican Party filed an emergency request on Thursday, asking the state Supreme Court for an immediate ruling on the case, contesting that the date was still a key component to ballot security.

The court ruled 4–3 in their favor on Monday, with Justices Kevin Brobson, Sallie Updyke Mundy, Kevin Dougherty, and David Wecht slamming some of the counties for considering the ballots.

“It is critical to the rule of law that individual counties and municipalities and their elected and appointed officials, like any other parties, obey the order of this court. As Justice Felix Frankfurter once wrote: ‘If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can,’” wrote Justice Wecht in a statement, joined by Justice Mundy. “‘That means first chaos, then tyranny.… The greater the power that defies law the less tolerant can this Court be of defiance.’”

The Trump transition team continues to float wildly unqualified people to serve in very important positions.

Politico reported on Monday that the short list to head the Department of Transportation includes Representative Sean Duffy, former Uber executive Emil Michael, and Representative Jenn Denham. 

Duffy, who is on the “short list,” is a former reality TV star and Fox News talking head who has been critical of Trump in the past. Michael is well liked by billionaire Trump surrogate Elon Musk (maybe because he’s an investor in Musk’s SpaceX company). And Denham, perhaps the most qualified, thinks energy-efficient high-speed rail is an example of “runaway government spending.” 

These picks all align with Trump’s bleak pro-business, anti-regulation vision for the Department of Transportation. Enjoy your walkable cities and decent public transportation (if you even have it) while you can.  

House Speaker Mike Johnson didn’t even bother trying to defend the quality of Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees.

During an interview on CNN Sunday, host Jake Tapper asked Johnson about the president-elect’s recent nominations, who represent a slew of ethical dilemmas that might offend a Christian who openly totes his “values” like Johnson does. While the Louisiana Republican may not be offended by any of Trump’s nominees’ policy ideas, one might imagine he’d be offended by their principles—or lack thereof.

Trump’s picks include former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, who allegedly paid two women to have sex with him and has been accused of committing statutory rape (he has denied any wrongdoing); Fox & Friends host Pete Hegseth, who reportedly paid a woman who accused him of sexually assaulting her as part of a nondisclosure agreement (he insists the encounter was consensual); and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaxxer who was caught in a messy extramarital affair during his failed presidential campaign.

“You’re a man of faith, you’re a man of God, you’re a man of family. With some of these nominees, Gaetz, Hegseth, RFK Jr., I wonder, does it matter anymore for Republicans to think of leaders as people who are moral in their personal lives? Is that still important to the Republican Party?” Tapper asked.

“Um, sure. It’s an important issue for anyone in leadership,” Johnson replied, quickly changing the subject. “This is what I’ll say about the nominees that the president has put forward is that they are persons who will shake up the status quo.”

Johnson insisted that Trump’s picks were “disruptors” by design—another way of saying they’re not good guys, but that’s kind of the point.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, though, as Johnson seems to have had no problem cozying up with Trump, a rapist who was convicted of 34 counts for falsifying business records to conceal hush-money payments made to keep an adult film actress quiet about his own extramarital affair.

Now that Donald Trump will be the next president, Republicans are eyeing overhauls to safety net programs like Medicaid and food stamps. 

The Washington Post reports that Trump’s advisers are speaking with Republicans in Congress about making big changes to federal assistance programs to pay for extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. These changes include new work requirements and spending caps, according to anonymous sources familiar with the discussions. 

Some Republicans have misgivings about how such changes will go over with the public, the Post reports, noting that these programs support at least 70 million low-income and disabled Americans.  

“I don’t think that passing just an extension of tax cuts that shows on paper an increase in the deficit [is] going to be challenging,” one Republican tax adviser told the Post. “But the other side of the coin is, you start to add things to reduce the deficit, and that gets politically more challenging.”

Parts of the bill are set to expire in 2025, and extending those provisions will add over $4 trillion to the national debt, which is already high at $36 trillion. Trump’s campaign promises of cutting taxes on tips and overtime will only add to that total. While Republicans say they support Trump’s further cuts, they don’t want more government borrowing, so they are looking for places to save money.

Social welfare programs have long been in Republican crosshairs. For example, Republicans could revive their efforts to cut food stamps, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, especially because the benefit automatically increases with inflation. They could also try to impose more limits on what food products can be bought under the program. But Republicans have taken heat in the past for merely floating cuts to these programs, and Democrats would likely seize on further attempts.

Trump’s 2017 tax overhaul cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans and corporations, and companies used that savings to buy back their own stock instead of doing things that would actually benefit the economy, for instance creating jobs. Extending those provisions would likely lead to more of the same, with the added cruelty of cutting government assistance to the most vulnerable of Americans. 

InfoWars may have been bought and sold out from under Alex Jones, but that doesn’t mean the conspiracy theorist is giving up the fight.

A company affiliated with Jones—First United American Companies, which sells dietary supplements—lost its bid for the far-right network last week, underbidding The Onion, which went on to claim InfoWars as its own. But the saga hasn’t ended there: In an attempt to recoup the lost bid, FUAC accused the bankruptcy trustee overseeing the auction of colluding with the satirical news site, as well as families of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre, to pass over the group’s $3.5 million bid.

But those allegations didn’t fly with the trustee, who on Monday argued in a legal notice that the group’s emergency motion was nothing more than a “disappointed bidder’s improper attempt to influence an otherwise fair and open auction process.

“Having failed in its prior efforts to bully the Trustee and his advisors into accepting its inferior bid, FUAC now alleges, without evidence, collusion and bad faith in an attempt to mislead the Court and disqualify its only competition in the auction,” Christopher R. Murray, the bankruptcy trustee, wrote in the filing.

The Onion reportedly bid $1.75 million for the site, in addition to incentives promised by the Sandy Hook families, who won a $1.5 billion lawsuit against Jones. (The families have since agreed to settle with Jones for a minimum sum of $85 million.) The families “agreed to forgo up to 100% of their share of the Infowars sale proceeds and give it to other Jones creditors,” reported ABC News.

Jones repeatedly claimed that the 2012 shooting that left 20 first graders and six teachers dead was a front to lure voters toward gun control policies.

In the run-up to the auction, Jones had appeared to be under the impression that “good guys” on the right would buy his fringe network, though he did not reveal who they were. Several groups expressed interest in InfoWars assets, including a coalition of liberal and anti-disinformation watchdog groups, according to The Daily Beast, as well as some of Jones’s own supporters, such as Donald Trump ally Roger Stone. The sale, however, has effectively crushed what was arguably Jones’s most successful endeavor while marking the beginning of his descent into irrelevancy.

“We’re obviously disappointed he’s lashing out by creating conspiracies, but we’re also not surprised,” Ben Collins, CEO of The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, said in a statement Monday.