Governor to seek Manchin position
West Virginia Republican Governor Jim Justice will run for moderate Senator Joe Manchin’s Senate seat, setting up a marquee fight in Democrats’ struggle to keep control of the chamber in 2024.
Justice, a former Democrat who switched parties during the Trump administration, filed official paperwork Thursday to run for the West Virginia seat after months of speculation from onlookers and teasing from Justice.
Justice didn’t immediately make a public comment. Manchin, who hasn’t yet announced whether he will seek reelection, said in a statement: “Make no mistake, I will win any race I enter.”
West Virginia, where Trump beat Biden by 39 percentage points in 2020, is the latest Senate battleground shaping up as a costly and volatile campaign. Justice, 72, had a 66 percent approval rating in a Morning Consult poll this month, which was 32 percentage points higher than Manchin.
Senate Democrats are preparing for expensive races to protect vulnerable incumbents in Trump-favored states including Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Jon Tester in Montana. They also face an expensive intra-party fight for Senator Dianne Feinstein’s California seat and a scrambled race in Arizona, another top battleground. The party is defending 23 seats while Senate Republicans are defending 11 seats.
The nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates the West Virginia race a toss-up.
Republican Representative Alex Mooney has already announced he’s running on a Trump-friendly platform and has denounced Justice as insufficiently conservative.
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Researcher says no election fraud found
Former president Donald Trump’s campaign quietly commissioned a second firm to study election fraud claims in the weeks after the 2020 election, and the founder of the firm was recently questioned by the Justice Department about his work disproving the claims.
Ken Block, founder of the firm Simpatico Software Systems, studied more than a dozen voter fraud theories and allegations for Trump’s campaign in late 2020 and found they were “all false,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post.
“No substantive voter fraud was uncovered in my investigations looking for it, nor was I able to confirm any of the outside claims of voter fraud that I was asked to look at,” he said. “Every fraud claim I was asked to investigate was false.”
Block said he recently received a subpoena from special counsel Jack Smith’s office and met with federal prosecutors in Washington, but he declined to discuss his interactions with them. Block said he contemporaneously sent his findings disputing fraud claims in writing to the Trump campaign in late 2020.
n Kansas, GOP enacts strict law bathroom access
TOPEKA, Kan. — Republican legislators in Kansas have enacted what may be the most sweeping transgender bathroom law in the United States on Thursday, overriding the Democratic governor’s veto of the measure without having a clear idea of how their new law will be enforced.
The vote in the House was 84-40, giving supporters exactly the two-thirds majority they needed to override Governor Laura Kelly’s action. The vote in the Senate on Wednesday was 28-12, and the new law will take effect July 1.
At least eight other states have enacted laws preventing transgender people from using the restrooms associated with their gender identities, but most of them apply to schools. The Kansas law applies also to locker rooms, prisons, domestic violence shelters, and rape crisis centers.
The Kansas law is different than most other states’ laws in that it legally defines male and female based on a person’s reproductive anatomy at birth and declares that “distinctions between the sexes” in bathrooms and other spaces serves “the important governmental objectives of protecting the health, safety and privacy.” Earlier this week, North Dakota enacted a law that prohibits transgender children and adults access to bathrooms, locker rooms, or showers in dormitories of state-run colleges and correctional facilities.
Kansas’ law doesn’t create a new crime, impose criminal penalties or fines for violations, or even say specifically that a person has a right to sue over a transgender person using a facility aligned with their gender identity. Many supporters acknowledged before it passed that they hadn’t considered how it will be administered.
The bill is written broadly enough to apply to any separate spaces for men and women and, Kelly’s office said, could prevent transgender women from participating in state programs for women, including for female hunters and farmers. As written, it also prevents transgender people from changing the gender markers on their driver’s licenses — though it wasn’t clear whether that change would occur without a lawsuit.
The new law is part a large push by Republicans across the US to roll back LGBTQ+ rights, particularly transgender rights. At least 21 states, including Kansas, restrict or ban female transgender athletes’ participation in girl’s and women sports, and at least 14 but not Kansas have restricted or banned gender-affirming care for minors.
Senate GOP seen trying to maintain ties with Trump
WASHINGTON — When Senator Steve Daines, the leader of the Senate Republican campaign arm, quietly informed Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, that he intended to endorse former president Donald Trump, McConnell was fine with the idea.
McConnell, the Kentucky Republican, is not on speaking terms with the former president, having abruptly turned against him after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Trump has publicly savaged the senator and repeatedly demeaned his wife with racist statements.
But the minority leader, according to a person familiar with his thinking, believed that somebody in the Senate GOP leadership ranks should have a working relationship with the party’s leading presidential contender — and it might as well be the man charged with winning back the Senate majority.
Daines’s endorsement of Trump this week — and McConnell’s private blessing of it — highlighted how top Senate Republicans have quietly decided to join forces with their party’s leading presidential candidate, putting aside the toxic relationship that some of them have with him to focus on what they hope will be a mutually advantageous political union.