Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Trump woos Republican AGs and House members to join his election assault

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is leading the multistate effort to convince the Supreme Court to toss the results from four battleground states won by Joe Biden.

Gabriel Aponte/Getty Images

Dozens of fresh and brazenly wrong claims by President Trump about stolen victory have not made it any closer to the truth. But they have accompanied a fresh rush of loyalty from his Republican allies.

GOP attorneys general in 17 other red states have joined the Texas effort to nullify the election results in big battlegrounds won by President-elect Joe Biden, a lawsuit that election law experts have uniformly derided with terms stretching from silly to outlandish, bonkers to dangerous. And as many as two dozen Republicans in the House were expected to sign on as well.

The Supreme Court could reject the claim outright as soon as the deadline for filing such briefs passes Thursday evening. If that happens, Trump will have nothing but his own false rhetoric to lean on until Congress meets to formalize the electoral vote count on Jan. 6, when more ultimately fruitless GOP shenanigans aiming to discredit democracy are guaranteed.


Trump invited the group of supportive GOP attorneys general to lunch in the Cabinet Room on Thursday, while the nation's Democratic attorneys general rushed to file by later afternoon their own brief urging the high court to throw out the Texas suit as soon as possible.

A late burst of litigation elsewhere, based on outside-the-box legal theories but unsupported by credible evidence, continues to prove fruitless.

On Thursday a Trump appointee to the federal bench in Wisconsin, Judge Brett Ludwig, said that ruling in favor of the president's bid to overturn the result in that state would be "the most remarkable ruling in the history of this court or the federal judiciary."

"All I ask for is people with wisdom and with courage, that's all," Trump told guests at a White House Hanukkah party Wednesday night. "Because if certain very important people, if they have wisdom and if they have courage, we're going to win this election in a landslide."

He backed that up with a simple "WISDOM & COURAGE!!!" tweet Thursday, one of about two dozen Twitter posts furthering his fabricated fraud claims in the past two days. Most have merited warning labels by the social media platform.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's lawsuit demands the Supreme Court use its power to settle disputes between the states to throw out the combined 62 electoral votes for Biden from Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. (With them Biden has 306 and Trump 232.)

The rationale, supported by unproven or disproven allegations, is that all those states acted unconstitutionally to make voting easier during the coronavirus pandemic.

A quick response from the Supreme Court is expected by the end of the week, at the latest, because the Electoral College meets across the country Monday to cast its votes.

Already this week, the court has dismissed without a word of disagreement the first election suit it touched — a bid by Pennsylvania Republicans to toss that state's result with the claim that the its mail-in voting rules are out of bounds.

The chairman of the conservative House GOP Freedom Caucus, Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana, reached out at Trump's behest to get members of the group to formally endorse the Texas suit. (Earlier this week, 25 of them called on Attorney General William Barr to appoint a special counsel to investigate "irregularities" in the election, even though Barr himself said last week the Justice Department and FBI had found no evidence to overturn the result.)

Trump used campaign funds to get an attorney to file a motion asking to intervene on behalf of Texas and reportedly asked one of state's senators, Ted Cruz, to represent him if the case is accepted. "This is the big one," the president explained on Twitter.

Even if the Electoral College votes as expected on Monday, congressional Republicans can stage a sure-to-fail effort to block Congress from finalizing the vote. It won't succeed because such a move would need approval by both the Senate and the Democratic House.

Read More

Is Bombing Iran Deja Vu All Over Again?

The B-2 "Spirit" Stealth Bomber flys over the 136th Rose Parade Presented By Honda on Jan. 1, 2025, in Pasadena, California. (Jerod Harris/Getty Images/TNS)

Jerod Harris/Getty Images/TNS)

Is Bombing Iran Deja Vu All Over Again?

After a short and successful war with Iraq, President George H.W. Bush claimed in 1991 that “the ghosts of Vietnam have been laid to rest beneath the sands of the Arabian desert.” Bush was referring to what was commonly called the “Vietnam syndrome.” The idea was that the Vietnam War had so scarred the American psyche that we forever lost confidence in American power.

The elder President Bush was partially right. The first Iraq war was certainly popular. And his successor, President Clinton, used American power — in the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere — with the general approval of the media and the public.

Keep ReadingShow less
Conspiratorial Thinking Isn’t Growing–Its Consequences Are
a close up of a typewriter with the word conspiracy on it

Conspiratorial Thinking Isn’t Growing–Its Consequences Are

The Comet Ping Pong Pizzagate shooting, the plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and a man’s livestreamed beheading of his father last year were all fueled by conspiracy theories. But while the headlines suggest that conspiratorial thinking is on the rise, this is not the case. Research points to no increase in conspiratorial thinking. Still, to a more dangerous reality: the conspiracies taking hold and being amplified by political ideologues are increasingly correlated with violence against particular groups. Fortunately, promising new research points to actions we can take to reduce conspiratorial thinking in communities across the US.

Some journalists claim that this is “a golden age of conspiracy theories,” and the public agrees. As of 2022, 59% of Americans think that people are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories today than 25 years ago, and 73% of Americans think conspiracy theories are “out of control.” Most blame this perceived increase on the role of social media and the internet.

Keep ReadingShow less
Why a College Degree No Longer Guarantees a Good Job
woman wearing academic cap and dress selective focus photography
Photo by MD Duran on Unsplash

Why a College Degree No Longer Guarantees a Good Job

A college education used to be considered, along with homeownership, one of the key pillars of the American Dream. Is that still the case? Recent experiences of college graduates seeking employment raise questions about whether a university diploma remains the best pathway to pursuing happiness, as it once was.

Consider the case of recent grad Lohanny Santo, whose TikTok video went viral with over 3.6 million “likes” as she broke down in tears and vented her frustration over her inability to find even a minimum wage job. That was despite her dual degrees from Pace University and her ability to speak three languages. John York, a 24-year-old with a master’s degree in math from New York University, writes that “it feels like I am screaming into the void with each application I am filling out.”

Keep ReadingShow less