Senate Passes Respect for Marriage Act Protecting Marriage Equality

The Senate voted 61–36 Tuesday to approve a bill enshrining marriage equality.

The Respect for Marriage Act, which applies to both same-sex and interracial marriage, would require that two people be considered married so long as their marriage was legal in the state in which it was performed. The act also repeals a 1996 law defining marriage as between a man and a woman, which has remained on the books despite being declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2015.

Thirty-six Republican senators voted against the bill, including Mitch McConnell, who is in an interracial marriage.

Many civil rights activists have warned that after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, same-sex marriage may be next on the chopping block.

The Senate voted 62-37 on November 16 to advance the bill to a final vote. The chamber had added an amendment to the bill clarifying certain protections for religious organizations.

It will now return to the House of Representatives before President Joe Biden can sign it into law.

The act already passed the House over the summer, although 156 voted against it—including a shockingly hypocritical nay vote from Representative Glenn Thompson, who attended his son’s same-sex wedding just a week later.

Critics of the bill say, though, that it does not go far enough with LGBTQ protections. Part of the amendment says that religious organizations do not have to marry same-sex couples, which would allow groups to continue to be homophobic, and the bill does not require all states to actually issue same-sex marriage license.

A federal jury on Tuesday convicted Oath Keepers leader Steward Rhodes of seditious conspiracy for his role in creating and inciting the violent plot to overturn the 2020 election results.

Rhodes and four other members of the Oath Keepers, a far-right anti-government militia, were found guilty of various crimes related to the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol. The members were convicted by a jury in Washington, D.C., on numerous charges.

Swarms of Oath Keepers were among the mob that invaded the Capitol and forced Congress into hiding.

Rhodes and subordinate Kelly Meggs were both found guilty of seditious conspiracy. Three other members—Jessica Watkins, Kenneth Harrelson, and Thomas Caldwell—alongside Rhodes and Meggs, were found guilty of obstruction of an official proceeding and aiding and abetting for their actions on January 6, 2021. Meggs and Watkins were also charged with conspiracy to obstruct.

Seditious conspiracy charges have been brought against far-right militia members in the past, but to little avail. Today’s convictions alter that pattern and open the door to holding other nefarious actors actually accountable for anti-democratic violence.

Rhodes’s conviction in particular is among the most significant developments to come from the web of investigations into the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Elected officials, rioters, and former Trump allies all are under various investigations. Such a conviction shows that there indeed is capacity to hold actors to account—and that those under investigation now are no exception to that standard.

South Carolina’s Supreme Court on Tuesday unanimously ordered former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to testify about efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.

“We have reviewed the arguments raised by [Meadows] and find them to be manifestly without merit,” the justices wrote.

The ruling affirmed a lower court that required Meadows to testify to the grand jury investigation. Meadows had appealed the decision but was rejected by the state supreme court.

Meadows was initially scheduled to testify on November 30. It is yet to be determined if that appearance will remain on time.

The former White House chief of staff was involved in numerous efforts to meddle with the 2020 election results. In December 2020, Meadows attended a White House meeting with Trump and others, where the topic of discussion was voter fraud and state electoral vote certifications. The very next day, Meadows traveled to Georgia, seeking to observe an audit of absentee ballot signatures.

Meadows also sent emails to Justice Department officials, demanding investigations into baseless claims of voter fraud. And in January 2021, Meadows was on the line as Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, pressuring him to “find 11,780 votes,” the amount needed to win Georgia.

The rejection of Meadows’s appeal follows an earlier attempt by him to avoid complying with the investigation. In October, a South Carolina county judge entertained Meadows’s challenges but promptly deemed him “material and necessary” to the Georgia investigation, compelling him to testify.

The investigation first began in February 2021, spurred in part by Trump’s plea to Raffensperger—again, a call that Meadows participated in. Since then, the probe has investigated and subpoenaed dozens of witnesses including Boris Epshteyn, Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, Michael Flynn, and Lindsey Graham (who similarly unsuccessfully tried appealing out of the investigation).

For a political party that claims to be the home of free thinkers, the GOP is pathetically subservient to a fragile, self-absorbed loser.

On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters that “there is no room in the Republican Party for antisemitism or white supremacy, and anyone meeting with people advocating that point of view, in my judgement, are highly unlikely to ever be elected president.”

McConnell’s comments come after twice-impeached, twice-popular-vote-losing former President Donald Trump met with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier, white nationalist, and racist who has threatened murder against Jews and expressed approval for the Taliban.

But despite McConnell’s supposed disapproval of antisemitism and white supremacy, he refused to say he wouldn’t support Trump if he wins the 2024 Republican nomination.

That McConnell won’t explicitly disavow Trump reveals how comically docile the GOP is. Recall the 2016 Republican primaries, when Trump made fun of Ted Cruz’s wife’s appearance and spread conspiracies about his father being involved in the assassination of JFK. Cruz initially expressed disapproval of Trump.

“I am not in the habit of supporting people who attack my wife and attack my father,” Cruz said. “That pledge was not a blanket commitment that if you go and slander my wife that I am going to come like a servile puppy dog for maligning my wife and maligning my father.”

Fast forward to late October 2022: Cruz said with a straight face on national television that his wife and father just had a nice laugh at Trump’s attacks. Cruz was among those seeking to challenge the 2020 election results and keep Trump in power.

As Trump’s first bid showed, it only takes a few primary wins to gain steam—especially if there’s a wide field of candidates splitting votes. If Republicans actually care about stopping Trump, their submission is just not going to cut it.

House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy finally spoke out Tuesday on Donald Trump meeting with a white supremacist…sort of.

It has been one week since Trump met with Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier and white supremacist, and rapper Kanye West, another outspoken antisemite. Republicans have been largely silent on the matter, or they have avoided explicitly criticizing Trump. The few exceptions, such as Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and Mitt Romney, were already vocal Trump critics and are not in party leadership positions.

McCarthy, the GOP nominee to be the new speaker of the House, condemned Fuentes Tuesday, telling reporters: “I don’t think anybody should be spending any time with Nick Fuentes. He has no place in this Republican Party.”

But he then repeatedly insisted that Trump “came out four times” against Fuentes and didn’t know who he was to begin with. Both statements are straight-up lies.

Trump has not condemned Fuentes, and although he claimed not to know who Fuentes is, the former president has previously retweeted a clip from his internet show. 

McCarthy is likely refraining from calling Trump out because condemning him risks alienating the former leader’s supporters still in Congress. McCarthy will need every vote he can get if he is to become speaker, a goal he has not been shy about publicizing.

Earlier Tuesday, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough slammed McCarthy’s (lack of) actions as “sad and pathetic.”

McCarthy “thinks his support depends on having white nationalists and supporters of neo-Nazis voting for him for speaker of the House,” Scarborough said.”

Despite a poor showing by MAGA candidates during the midterms, Trump still holds considerable sway in Congress. The GOP establishment seems to be souring on him, but they still need his support to present a unified front.

A month after Halloween, Marco Rubio got to dust off his favorite costume as a faux-populist. On Tuesday, the Florida senator tweeted in his apparent support for rail workers:

Rubio’s tweet comes after President Joe Biden’s Monday announcement, in which he called on Congress to pass legislation and block an impending railroad strike.

While the majority of railroad unions voted for the White House-brokered deal, the majority of railroad workers voted against it. A primary worker complaint about the deal is that it lacks paid sick days.

Instead of heeding those complaints, Biden has urged Congress to impose the deal anyways. Now, Rubio is pretending to care about workers—without any specific engagement towards the actual issues workers face.

This isn’t Rubio’s first rodeo. Last year, Rubio “spoke out” on behalf of unionizing Amazon workers. He avoided expressing actual support of a union itself. Instead, Rubio explained it makes sense workers might want a union in response to “woke” human resources fads.

In other words, Rubio’s “support” for workers had little to do with the material conditions they faced, and more with his ability to use them as a vessel for Republicans’ continual hollow efforts to stoke culture war. Those efforts continue today.

In his brave tweet, Rubio did not actually specify what would comprise an acceptable deal (like including paid sick leave for workers). He could also speak against nine of his Republican colleagues currently cosponsoring a bill that would force workers to accept a deal without sick leave. And yet.

Despite Rubio—or any other Republicans’—posturing, there is no such thing as a conservative workers’ movement. Conservatives (whether Republican or Democrat) are opposed to expanding social welfare or other public programs. They are massive recipients of corporate dollars, from big finance to fossil fuels. And they certainly act in accordance with those dollars.

Biden is dropping the ball for workers here—but let’s not pretend Rubio and Republicans actually care about that.

Georgia has broken its own state record for the most ballots cast in a single day.

Statewide early voting has begun in Georgia’s Senate runoff election between Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker, and voters are fully embracing the opportunity. On Monday, over 300,000 Georgia voters turned out to cast their ballots. The previous record for early voting in a single day was 233,000 votes in 2018.

As of early Tuesday morning, one week before Election Day, turnout eclipsed 500,000, or 7 percent of all registered Georgia voters. Women outpace men, making up 55.4 percent of early voters. Meanwhile, 9.4 percent of registered Black voters have already voted, a higher percentage than any other ethnic group.

Before Monday’s record, nearly 182,000 people had voted, either with absentee ballots or in select counties that opened voting earlier.

State and national Republican officials fought to prevent the state from allowing early voting before Monday, but the Georgia Supreme Court ruled against them.

As early voting began, the two campaigns pursued different strategies. Warnock spent his time over the weekend around Atlanta rallying supporters and leading a march to the polls. He  benefited from surrogates including Senator Cory Booker, hip-hop artist Waka Flocka Flame, and Yolanda King, civil rights activist and Martin Luther King’s granddaughter.

Meanwhile, Walker spent his time pontificating that anyone peacefully protesting after 5 p.m. should be arrested, that young people don’t know what racism is, and that people born after 1990 “haven’t earned the right” to try changing the country—and he invited them to leave America instead of complaining, saying they should lose their citizenship if they do.

While Walker complains about young people, more voters aged 18-24 have voted than those aged 25-29, 30-34, 35-40, or 40-45 as of early Tuesday morning.

It is too early to make definite predictions as to what the data may portend. But Warnock’s closing message is one of enthusiasm and vision, while Walker is just grumbling about people whose support he ostensibly wants. Voters most eager to turn out early may likely be supporting one message distinctly over the other!

In a confusing twist, the Arizona GOP-controlled county that refused to certify the 2022 midterm elections had voted for Kari Lake as governor.

The two Republican members of Cochise County’s supervisory board voted Monday to delay certification, despite there being no evidence of voter fraud.

What’s more, the vote count published by the Cochise County board showed that Lake won by an overwhelming 58.15 percent, compared to Katie Hobbs’s 40.49 percent.

Arizona Secretary of State Hobbs, the Democratic governor-elect and apparently the world’s worst vote-rigger, sued Cochise County for failing to meet the state’s deadline for certification. The lawsuit will force the county to certify the votes by December 8, which will shrink her margin of victory.

“The Board’s inaction not only violates the plain language of the statute, but also undermines a basic tenet of free and fair elections in this state: ensuring that every Arizonan’s voice is heard,” the lawsuit said.

Arizona has been plagued with election falsehoods since surprisingly going for Joe Biden in 2020, and the midterms were no exception: early voting was rife with voter intimidation.

On Election Day, when some of the polling stations in Maricopa County began experiencing issues with their tabulator machines, right-wing figures accused the state government of trying to rig the race—even though people could still vote.

Lake sued Maricopa County officials over the weekend, supposedly over the tabulator issues but really to try to delay certification. The two Cochise County Republican supervisors also cited tabulator issues, saying the county’s machines had not been properly certified.

Both of those supervisors are Covid-19 skeptics, and one is an election denier like Lake. They had voted to turn down almost $2 million in government Covid-19 relief funds because Peggy Judd said it should be treated “like the common cold,” and Tom Crosby compared the coronavirus vaccine to Agent Orange.

Judd also participated in the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

All of Arizona’s other counties have certified the votes.

Officials in a Republican-controlled county in Arizona voted to delay certifying the 2022 midterm election results, meaning they will miss the state’s legal deadline of 5:00 p.m. Monday and face legal action.

Cochise County’s decision came despite there being absolutely no discovery of fraud during the voting process.

“There is no reason for us to delay,” the board of supervisors chair Ann English, a Democrat, said. Her vote to certify was outweighed by the votes against from the two Republican board members.

The Arizona secretary of state’s office confirmed it will sue the county for failing to meet the deadline. The secretary, Katie Hobbs, was elected as governor during the race earlier in November.

Lawyer and Democracy Docket founder Marc Elias also hinted he will file suit against Cochise County.

Arizona has become a crucial swing state after surprisingly going for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. Then-Governor Doug Ducey certified the vote results, but Arizona has been plagued with election falsehoods since.

The midterms were no exception: during early voting, the state reported 18 cases of voter intimidation, including self-appointed poll watchers showing up at ballot boxes with guns.

On Election Day, about 20 percent of the polling stations in Maricopa County began experiencing issues with their tabulator machines. Even though people could still vote, right-wing figures accused the state government of trying to rig the race for Democrats.

Also on Monday, the Maricopa County certification meeting dragged on for hours. County officials ultimately certified the votes, but only after dozens of election deniers accused them of fixing or even destroying ballots.

Kari Lake, who despite her baseless claims otherwise lost the gubernatorial race to Hobbs, retweeted multiple videos of people sharing election conspiracies during the Maricopa meeting. She sued Maricopa County election officials over the weekend, ostensibly to make them respond to her campaign’s public records request about the tabulator issues, but really because she’s a sore loser.

Tyler Adams knows when to apologize—and when not to.

At a press conference on Monday, the U.S. men’s soccer captain was confronted by an Iranian state media reporter who accused Adams of hypocrisy.

“You say you support the Iranian people, but you’re pronouncing our country’s name wrong,” Press TV reporter Milad Javanmardy said.

Javanmardy proceeded to press Adams, asking, “Are you okay to be representing a country that has so much discrimination against Black people?”

Adams, 23, apologized about his mispronunciation of “Iran,” before thoughtfully answering Javanmardy’s pointed question.

“I grew up in a white family with obviously an African-American heritage and background, as well. So I had a little bit of different cultures and I was very, very easily able to assimilate in different cultures,” he said.

“Not everyone has that ease and the ability to do that…through education, I think it’s super important. Like you just educated me now on the pronunciation of your country…I think, as long as you see progress, that’s the most important thing.”

Monday’s conference was unusual, as both Adams and U.S. coach Gregg Berhalter fielded charged question after question, ranging from why the American government hasn’t removed a Naval ship from near Iran to why people with an Iranian passport can’t travel to America.

Iranian state affiliates have attacked the U.S. Soccer Federation for its social media accounts displaying Iran’s flag without the emblem of the Islamic Republic. U.S. Soccer said it wanted to change the flag for 24 hours to express “support for the women in Iran fighting for basic human rights.”.

In response, Iranian state media suggested on Sunday that the U.S. should be kicked out of the World Cup and suspended for 10 games.

Javanmardy, who questioned Adams, works for Press TV—an organization owned by the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting. The corporation’s head is appointed by the Iranian state leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Of course, Javanmardy is not wrong in a general sense about America’s pervasive racism. But his targeted questioning is part of a larger pattern of whataboutism by Iranian state affiliates to detract attention from the state’s continual civil rights violations. And Adams, the youngest captain at this year’s World Cup, seamlessly displayed the brazen ridiculousness of it all.