Monthly Archives: June 2021

CASPER Two Wyoming lawmakers and a former state representative say they were targeted as part of an undercover operation performed by conservative operatives, one a Cody native, to infiltrate political campaigns and progressive groups during the 2020 election cycle.

Wyoming appeared to be the home base for these efforts, according to an investigation published Friday by the New York Times. The conservative operatives, Sofia LaRocca and Beau Maier, a 2003 CHS grad, reportedly used the Wapiti home of Erik Prince, the founder of private military firm Blackwater, for training. The effort was funded, the newspaper reported, by Susan Gore, a wealthy Gore-Tex heiress and Jackson resident, who founded the Wyoming Liberty Group, a political advocacy organization with conservative and libertarian leanings.

Rep. Karlee Provenza (D-Laramie) and her husband Nate Martin, the executive director of progressive group Better Wyoming, were among those targeted by LaRocca and Maier, according to the New York Times. So were state Democratic Party leaders and Wyoming Speaker of the House Eric Barlow, R-Gillette. The effort targeted moderate Republicans as well as Democrats.

They pretended to be our friends, Provenza told the Star-Tribune. They stuck around for a long time. I had conversations with these people for over a year.

Provenza and many of the politicos targeted by Maier and LaRocca said the two were not very adept at espionage.

They also were bad at what they did, Provenza said. When we met these folks early on, we were referring to them as moles. We believed they were not who they said they were, but we wrote ourselves off as paranoid.

LaRocca approached the Democratic Party in late January 2019, when she expressed an interest in getting involved in fundraising for the party, explained Nina Hebert, who was then the digital director for the Democratic Party.

There, she remained as a volunteer until she got hired by the Wyoming Democratic Party as a contract fundraiser, although she never raised any money, Hebert said. LaRocca left the organization in June 2020.

I dont think they have enough working knowledge of the political process as a whole, Hebert said.

Barlow had a less intimate experience with the couple. He said he had correspondence with Maier several times over email and phone calls and twice in person.

The majority of the interactions were cordial and policy-centric, he added. He too called the couples spying tactics sad.

Sara Burlingame, a former Democratic state representative from Cheyenne, says she was also targeted by LaRocca while she was in office. LaRocca requested a meeting with her about flipping Wyoming blue, Burlingame said. LaRocca proposed that Democrats need to be really creative and inventive and steal pages from the Republican playbook, like secretly recording, Burlingame said.

But issues in that conversation arose when it became clear that LaRocca did not know much about Wyomings politics.

She didnt know who anyone was in the Legislature was, she didnt know any of our issues, Burlingame said. Its not just that theyre unethical, theyre unrealistic. In a nutshell bad at what they do.

Provenza told a nearly identical story.

Maier also approached Provenza and Martin with a pitch to make Wyoming a blue state, Provenza said.

They also were bad at what they did, Provenza later added. The way he went about it was just clunky.

But why target Wyoming the reddest state in the country, where Democrats wield little power?

We know that the organization is based in Wyoming ... and so it may be that this is the pilot program or some sort of training for these operatives that they will send to other states, said Joe Barbuto, chair of the Wyoming Democratic Party, who also met with LaRocca on multiple occasions.

As of present, theres really no concrete reason that we know of that they were in Wyoming except for thats where this organization was headquartered, he added.

Wyoming politics have, generally speaking, become coarser over the past decade, with more national interference. But state leaders dont want political espionage to be the new normal.

For me, I dont want to sit back and say, Yeah, this is politics because that invites a dangerous reality. It should be completely unacceptable, Provenza said.

Barlow echoed Provenza.

Its very disappointing that we would even consider this to be normal and I dont think anyone does, and I dont hope they do, Barlow said.

Still, the disclosure of the undercover political operation has shaken the Wyoming political sphere, according to interviews with multiple state lawmakers.

I go from not knowing how to feel to extremely violated, Provenza said. These people were in my home.

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NY Times: Cody native one of spies that infiltrated Democrats - Cody Enterprise

WASHINGTONDemocrats face a daunting task: turning years of talking about raising taxes on corporations and high-income Americans into legislation that can get through razor-thin congressional majorities and onto President Bidens desk.

As top Democrats design a roughly $1 trillion infrastructure deal, and a second, broader antipoverty package in coming months, they need to resolve differences over the amount of spending, how much must be paid for, and which of Mr. Bidens proposed tax increases should advance. After meeting with senior administration officials on Thursday, the tax committee chairmen in Congress said lawmakers would make those decisions over the next several weeks.

Were going to build the plan, figure out what people want, what theyre willing to pay for, but also not to be deterred, House Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal (D., Mass.), said in an interview Friday. Theres this moment, when were talking about Great Society achievements and were talking about New Deal achievements. This is it.

Democrats raised taxes each of the last two times they controlled the governmentin 1993 and 2010after bruising political battles that drew objections from moderates inside the party.

Now, some Democrats are convinced that tax politics have changed and public concern about inequality and corporate tax avoidance make the issue less toxic. The goal: approach 1990s levels of taxes, as a share of the economy, without reversing middle-class tax cuts enacted since then or raising taxes directly on households making under $400,000, a level that covers all but 2% of Americans.

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Democrats Focus on Turning Tax Talk Into Action - The Wall Street Journal

On a sweltering morning in Harvard Square, Leah Samura strode through the future home of a recreational marijuana shop she plans to open this fall and marveled at the irony of the location: Thestore where she will soon sell legal pot was once a police station.

"To be a Black woman in Harvard Square with a cannabis shop that used to be a police station is just an amazing opportunity," Samura said.

Launching her store,Yamba Boutique,has not been easy. Marijuana may be legal in Massachusetts and many other states, but a federal prohibition makes banks wary of issuing business loans to cannabis companies.

Democrats and Republicans in Washington increasingly agree it is time to legalize marijuana at the federal level; the trouble is lawmakers don't see eye to eye on how to do it.

Entrepreneurs caught in the middle of this debate often have to get creative. Samura and her husband, Sieh who is leading the plan for a second Yamba location, in Cambridge's Central Square have managed to pay some bills by supplying other retailers with a cannabis product they developed.

"It is a cannabis-infused personal lubricant," Leah Samura explained. "It was designed to really help women deal with some of the issues that we have down there."

The product's sales are not enough to cover all the costs of getting a business off the ground, however, so the Samuras turned to a private investor named Sean Hope. Though Hope is a successful attorney and real estate developer, the new cannabis company is a stretch even for him.

"I have essentially leveraged my family's worth in real estate to be able to participate," he said. "There's tremendous risk."

Lifting the federal marijuana ban could mitigate the risk by easing bank lending.

It also could bring the law in line with public opinion. In a recent Pew poll, 91% of American adults said marijuana should at least be legal for medical use, and 60% backed recreational use.Plus the vast majority of states have legalized medical or recreational marijuana already.

Yet Democrats and Republicans are in a stalemate.

"All we want is strictly to legalize it," saidTom Mountain, vice chair of the Massachusetts Republican Party, which supports a relatively straightforward legalization proposal by GOP congressmen Don Young of Alaska and David Joyce of Ohio.

"Now, the Democrats, on the other hand, they want to add a surtax to it," Mountain continued. "And then they want to divert the money to this program and that program. It's so typical. It's really so typical."

A Democratic bill called the MORE Act includes clearing some criminal records and funding social justice efforts with a 5% to 8% sales tax. MORE stands for Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement.

"I think it confronts the injustices of the past and charts a better path forward and gives people back their lives," said Rep.Ayanna Pressley, a cosponsor.

Studies show cannabis law enforcement disproportionately affects people of color, so Pressley argues it is only fair that people of color reap financial rewards from cannabis legalization.

Sieh Samura worries that is unlikely to happen without the special provisions in the MORE Act.

"Equity considerations for a fair market and the long history of cannabis prohibition and all the people that have been harmed there have to be part of the equation or else you will not be able to build a healthy, sustainable market," he said.

Still, Congress could legalize cannabis at the federal level and leave it up to states to launch equity initiatives, if they see fit. Some, like Massachusetts, already have such programs.

But a bipartisan deal does not appear imminent. The House passed a version of the MORE Act last year, only to see it stall in the Senate. The same could happen again.

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Republicans And Democrats Are Divided Over Marijuana. Businesses Are Caught In The Middle - WBUR

Former Georgia state House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams. AP Photo/Brynn Anderson, File

Trump said that the GOP "might have been better" with Democrat Stacey Abrams as Georgia's governor.

The former president continues to take digs at Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp.

Last year, Kemp rejected Trump's entreaties to overturn President Biden's win in Georgia.

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Former President Donald Trump still has Georgia on his mind.

After Joe Biden narrowly won the state in last year's presidential race, Trump prodded Republican Gov. Brian Kemp to convene the conservative-led state legislature in order to overturn the results and pressured GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" additional votes to ensure a statewide win.

Trump's entreaties were rejected, but he has continued to attack both men for what he says was an unfair election process in the state, withholding an endorsement of Kemp in his 2022 reelection campaign and backing Rep. Jody Hice in a Republican secretary of state primary over Raffensperger.

Read more: How Trump could use his relationship with Putin and Russia to skirt prosecution back in the USA

In 2018, Kemp's Democratic opponent was former state House Minority Leader and voting-rights activist Stacey Abrams.

The race was highly competitive, with Kemp edging out Abrams, by 1.4 percentage points, 50.2%-48.8%, the smallest margin in a Georgia governor's race since 1966.

Trump was a staunch supporter of Kemp in his first race, but that goodwill has since dried up.

During his first post-presidential rally in Ohio on Saturday, the former president suggested that Abrams might have been a more preferable choice for the GOP than Kemp.

"By the way, we might have been better if she did win for governor of Georgia, if you want to know the truth," Trump said. "We might have had a better governor if she did win."

Trump has not endorsed any of the lesser-known candidates running against Kemp in the GOP gubernatorial primary, but the former president could play a decisive role in the immediate future of the state party.

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Trump suggests that Republicans might have been better off if Democrat Stacey Abrams was Georgia's governor instead of Brian Kemp - Yahoo News

Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia offered an analogy to the "Peanuts" comic strip on Monday, comparing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to the character "Lucy" who always yanks a football away from "Charlie Brown" at the last second.

"It's not unlike him to sometimes pull the football out when the kicker is just about to kick it. I've seen him do that before," Kaine told Politico. "And I know that that's sometimes more frustrating for the Republicans than it is for the Dems. He's pretty inscrutable."

Republicans have sometimes been accused of trying to pull a bait-and-switch with Democrats on immigration and infrastructure, promising backing for bipartisan measures that ultimately never materializes.

Kaine also told reporters that Democrats are starting to assemble an up to $6 trillion party-line package which will move through Congress using an arduous path called budget reconciliation. That allows Democrats to muscle through a separate package focused on childcare, climate change, and healthcare without Republican votes.

On Monday, McConnell demanded that President Joe Biden ensure Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi follow his lead and sever any link between the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure deal and the reconciliation package. The latter measure can clear the Senate with a simple majority.

"The President cannot let congressional Democrats hold a bipartisan bill hostage over a separate and partisan process," he said in a statement.

Democrats are likely to trigger the party-line process in mid-July once they return from a two-week recess. But they're clashing on both price tag and scope. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia said on Sunday he would support up to a $2 trillion economic package that's fully paid for and doesn't grow the national debt.

Manchin's position will likely frustrate progressives such as Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They're pressing for a huge spending package that includes aggressive measures to combat climate change, tax hikes on corporations and the wealthy, along with Medicare expansion.

"I think the key for progressives is as long as Dems are willing to act by reconciliation for the pieces we couldn't get, that's great," Kaine told reporters on Thursday, adding that a range of climate and immigration provisions could end up in a Democratic-only package.

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Democratic senator says Mitch McConnell may 'pull the football out' from Democrats on infrastructure - Business Insider

Democratic Reps. Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Cori Bush (Mo.) and other progressives are introducing new legislation seeking to transform the nations public safety response by funding and researching non-carceral alternatives to police.

The Peoples Response Act, co-led by Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), would create a new public safety agency in the Department of Health and Human Services to fund research and grants into health-centered investments in public safety.

This would include launching a federal first responders unit to support states and local governments with emergency health crises, as well as some $2.5 billion for those governments and community organizations to hire first responders who are mental health and substance abuse counselors.

For too long, our flawed approach to public safety has centered criminalization, surveillance and incarceration, rather than care, justice and healing, Pressley said in a news release.

Bush said that the vision for the legislation is to transform public safety into a system of care rather than criminalization, healing rather than incarceration, and prevention rather than policing.

Last year, in the wake of the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other Black people, activists renewed calls to defund police departments and reinvest in communities, namely in alternative responses to 911 calls, including with mental health expert responders.

In several high-profile cases, people have been killed by police after a 911 call seeking support for a mental health crisis or substance abuse issue.

In 2019, Fort Worth police shot and killed Atatiana Jefferson, a 28-year-old Black woman, in her own home after responding to a neighbors request for a welfare check.

In January, a police officer in Killeen, Texas, fatally shot Patrick Warren, who was Black and unarmed, on the lawn of his home, after his family called for mental health support.

And earlier this year, after a neighbor called 911 reporting a man who appeared drunk in a park in Alameda, California, police arrived and handcuffed Mario Gonzalez, thenkneeled on his back for minutes, killing the 26-year-old Latino father.

Since the wave of protests last summer against racist police violence, some cities have responded by redirecting funds budgeted for law enforcement to alternative public safety efforts.

Last week in Oakland, California, for instance, the city council voted to use some $18 million (out of an over $300 million annual police budget) to fund alternatives to policing, including having unarmed fire department staff respond to nonviolent 911 calls.

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Dallas Democratic state Rep. John Turner announced Monday he will not seek reelection in 2022 to the District 114 seat he first won in 2018, flipping a district that had been dominated by Republicans.

This decision is for one reason alone: my conclusion that another campaign and another full legislative session are not compatible with the time I need to devote at this stage in life to being a father and husband, Turner said in a statement on Twitter.

This announcement comes just weeks before the Texas Legislature is scheduled to convene a special session on July 8. Gov. Greg Abbott announced the session after Democrats walked out the House chamber on May 30 to kill a Republican-backed elections bill.

We were able to stop some bad bills from passing in this session. We were unified in our opposition to the restrictive voting bill that you have no doubt read about over the last few days, Turner wrote on Facebook after the end of the regular session on June 1. We will keep fighting against that bill in the special session ahead.

District 114 is a Republican-leaning district, held by former Republican Rep. Jason Villalba until he lost the 2018 primary election to Lisa Luby Ryan. The GOP is expected to target the seat in 2022.

The Texas Legislature will be handling the redistricting process in the coming months and filing begins in September for the 2022 primary election, said Will Busby, director of development and communications for the Dallas County Republican Party. We look forward to seeing who files to run for Texas House District 114 and the work ahead to take back that seat in 2022.

Turner authored and co-authored 48 bills this legislative session, many concerning public health and voting issues. He pushed through a bill that will give law enforcement more resources to combat street racing, which is set to take effect Sept. 1.

In April, Turner voted against the hotly contested permitless carry bill, which lets Texans carry handguns in public without a license. Abbott signed the bill into law in June.

I was disappointed that the Texas House this week approved removing our longstanding requirement to have a license in order to carry a handgun in public, Turner tweeted after the House passed the legislation. I was one of the 58 votes against abolishing the requirement.

Turner is a centrist Democrat like his father, Jim Turner, who served in Texas politics for 24 years: He was mayor of Crockett, a state representative, a state senator and a congressman. His fathers career sparked Turners interest in politics.

Turner is also a practicing lawyer his regular job, as he calls it in addition to his Texas House duties. Turner cited the difficulties involved in this balancing act as one of the reasons hes not going to run again.

Republican Luisa del Rosal, who lost to Turner in the 2020 general election by a 53.6-46.4% margin, said in a tweet that shes weighing her options and will make an announcement soon.

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Dallas state Rep. John Turner announces he wont seek reelection in 2022 - The Dallas Morning News

Jim Hartman Courtesy Photo

Judge Amy Barrett will overturn the Affordable Care Act. So declared Vice President Kamala Harris last fall.More from Harris then:President Trump made it clear that he had a litmus test for Supreme Court justices destroy the Affordable Care Acts protection for people with preexisting conditions and overturn our right to make our own health care decisions.... Republicans are desperate to get Judge Barrett confirmed and millions of Americans will suffer for their power play.Joe Bidens official statement on the Supreme Court nomination of Barrett last year mentioned her name once . It mentioned Roe vs. Wade once. It had eight sentences alluding to the pending case on the Affordable Care Act claiming Americans would lose their health insurance.There were other similar false demagogic messages, including from Sen. Chuck Schumer that Barrett clearly said shed strike down the Affordable Care Act.Nancy Pelosi charged that Barretts nomination threatens destruction of life-saving protections for 135 million Americans with pre-existing conditions together with every other benefit and protection of the ACA.Progressive zealot , Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, opined: Confirming Amy Coney Barrett will be the end of the Affordable Care Act.All wrong totally wrong. Will all the Democratic Party luminaries who claimed Barretts confirmation would mean the end of ObamaCare now apologize?Democrats actually knew last year that ObamaCare was in no real threat of being overturned.On June 17, Barrett very predictably joined the U. S. Supreme Courts 7-2 majority upholding the law.During Barretts confirmation hearings, Democrats absurdly claimed that placing her on the court was to assure that the ACA would be invalidated. But Barretts record, in addition to her answers to Senate Judiciary Committee questions, made it a near certainty that she would not vote to toss out the statute.Two important lessons should be learned never underestimate Democratic Party politicians cynicism, and, that conservative justices dont decide cases based on their policy preferences.Texas and 17 other states with Republican attorneys general, along with two individual plaintiffs, in California vs. Texas, challenged the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, after Congress zeroed out the penalty for not carrying health insurance in the 2017 tax reform.Plaintiffs dubious argument was that the entire ACA became unconstitutional when Congress zeroed out the individual mandate the mandate having been the basis on which the court in 2012 had earlier upheld the statute. Most judicial experts expected plaintiffs to lose.As a matter of law, the plaintiffs contention that the mandate was not severable from the rest of the ACA, therefore invalidating the entire voluminous statute, was untenable. In addition, plaintiffs did not have standing to raise their claims.In the end , six (Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas, Sotomayor, Kagan, Kavanaugh and Barrett) joined Justice Breyers opinion in declining even to reach the merits and held instead that plaintiffs lacked standing.Under court precedents, plaintiffs must suffer an injury in fact, The courts seven vote majority found that neither the individuals nor the states could show they would be harmed by the zeroed-out penalty. Justices Alito and Gorsuch dissented.The decision underscored that the court, even with recent additions of more conservative justices, is still able to find broad coalitions supporting middle-ground outcomes in controversial cases.Progressives treat the Supreme Court as just another policy-making body and court justices as politicians. They claimed Barretts confirmation would result is a series of far-right legal victories. But the conservative justices are demonstrating a diversity of legal views that are neither uniform nor radical.Health-care policy needs to be addressed, but that remains a task for Congress. The Roberts Court, with a now stronger conservative majority, intends to defer to Congress.It should never be the Supreme Courts responsibility to re-write health care law.Jim Hartman is an attorney residing in Genoa. Email lawdocman1@aol.com.

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Jim Hartman: Democrats' 'Obamascare' proven wrong | Serving Carson City for over 150 years - Nevada Appeal