HERE’S WHY SENATE BORDER DEAL BLEW UP: That Lankford-Murphy-Sinema border security compromise went nowhere for several reasons. The only surprise is that anybody was surprised that the proposal had such a short, unhappy life.
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BILL MANDATES MONITORING BELT AND ROAD: Sen. James Lankford today introduced legislation requiring every U.S. overseas embassy to designate an official to monitor local activities linked to China’s predatory lending program known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). One might wonder why the State Department has to be told by Congress to keep an eye on one of the major tools employed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to expand Beijing’s world-wide totalitarian influence. But at least the Oklahoma Republican is doing something about it.
A SENATOR TO KEEP AN EYE ON: Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) had a tough act to follow in his predecessor, Sen. Tom “Dr. No” Coburn, who exposed Alaska’s infamous “Bridge to Nowhere” and who was a bulwark against stupid and fraudulent federal spending.
But, as I explain this morning in The Epoch Times, Lankford is emerging as the conservative senator most likely to expose, carefully and directly, the multifarious ways in which Democrats in the White House, the federal bureaucracy, the mainstream media and elsewhere manipulate language and legal precedent to mislead, abuse and oppress.
As one former Coburn staffer admiringly described Lankford: “He’s a legislator, not a headline-chaser.” He’s also a man of genuinely principled and daily demonstrated faith, which makes him particularly worth watching.
HURRAY FOR SENATOR JAMES LANKFORD: This senator is NOT happy with govt’s response to overreach concerns.
Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., has been trying for months to get the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights to justify it’s expansion of Title IX. When OCR finally responded (late), its justification was, let’s just say, lacking.
Now Lankford has written back, rejecting OCR’s justification and saying he was “unpersuaded” by its response letter.
“In my letter, I asked you to provide me with the statutory or regulatory language that the 2010 Dear Colleague letter on sexual harassment and bullying purports to interpret in cataloguing potentially prohibited conduct,” Lankford wrote. “Far from providing clarity, the 2010 letter obfuscates conduct constituting actionable sexual harassment under Title IX by including examples that ‘can’ violate Title IX.”
The “Dear Colleague” letters are allegedly “guidance” documents issued by OCR that don’t carry the force of law. The letters, however, threaten schools with a loss of federal funding and an investigation if they don’t comply.
OCR claimed it could expand what is covered under Title IX – a federal anti-gender discrimination statute – because the language was similar to that in past Dear Colleague letters. Lankford disagrees, writing that the language has been changed.
“Most significantly, you point to 2006’s Sexual Harassment: It’s Not Academic guidance pamphlet as developing the ‘same examples’ as the 2010 Dear Colleague letter,” Lankford wrote. “This is misleading, since the 2006 pamphlet made clear that such examples could not rise to an actionable Title IX violation without the presence of additional elements.”
Lankford also notes that none of the previous Dear Colleagues are supposed to carry the force and effect of law, so they cannot therefore “provide sufficient support to answer the question I posed in my January 7 letter: What statutory or regulatory authority do you construe to arrive at the conclusion that Title IX requires that this proscribed conduct ‘can’ be prohibited?”
Beyond sexual harassment and bullying, Lankford had requested justification for OCR’s sudden requirement that all schools use the low “preponderance of evidence” standard for deciding whether a student has committed sexual assault (a felony that leaves a lasting impact on a student who has been accused). The preponderance standard means an administrator has to be just 50.01 percent sure a student sexually assaulted his or her accuser, meaning that same administrator can be 49.99 percent sure the assault didn’t occur, and still brand someone a rapist.
Abolish OCR. Hell, repeal Title IX, since the feds can’t apply it as written, and universities aren’t willing to fight them.
J.D. JOHANNES WRITES:
A little heads up. With Rep. James Lankford running for Coburn’s seat, his House seat OK-5 will be open.
Lt. Colonel Steve Russell (Ret.) is very likely to run. He served at term in the OK State Senate shortly after retiring from the Army.
Here’s a story I did about him for TIME. Took him back to Iraq, totally un-emebedded, to the street where in 2003 he wasted some of Sadaam’s goons.
Cool.
WHAT SENATE DEMS REFUSED TO TALK ABOUT IN BORDER TALKS: There is nothing in that immigration reform package negotiated by Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Az.) that addresses the effects of the 8 million illegal aliens already allowed into the country under Joe Biden.
UNEXPECTEDLY: Yellen Admits that CCP-Linked Silicon Valley Bank Depositors Will Be Bailed Out by U.S. Banks.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen admitted during a Thursday Congressional hearing that Chinese Communist Party-linked businesses that had deposits in Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) will be made whole by the American banking system.
Senator James Lankford (R., Okla.) pressed Yellen on the matter during a Senate Finance Committee hearing held days after Silicon Valley Bank collapsed.
“It has been reported publicly that SVB had a large number of Chinese investors that are there including some companies that were directly connected to the Chinese Communist Party,” Senator Lankford (R., Okla.) asked Yellen during Thursday afternoon’s hearing. “So what I’m asking is: will my banks in Oklahoma pay a special assessment to be able to make Chinese investors whole in Silicon Valley Bank?”
Secretary Yellen confirmed that they would.
Or as America’s Newspaper of Record reported: Man Struggling To Feed Family Just Glad He Could Help Bail Out Bank.
COMING TO TERMS: The COVID lockdowns were all for naught.
How different it feels this time around. Broadcasters are lustily cheering anti-lockdown protesters in China. Members of Congress offer unqualified support. President Joe Biden, although more guarded, is sympathetic.
No Western politician, as far as I can see, is insulting the protesters. They are not dismissed as selfish or sociopathic, nor as dupes of conspiracy theories. Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) captured the mood: “To the people of China — we hear you and we stand with you as you fight for your freedom.”
Broadcasters and columnists who spent 2020 calling anti-lockdowners kooks and criminals are now uncomplicatedly applauding their Chinese counterparts. They see ordinary people standing up against an authoritarian government the anti-COVID policies of which were crushing liberty. . . .
Guess which developed country had the lowest excess mortality between 2020 and 2022. Go on, have a guess. That’s right. Sweden, which refused to close shops or schools or to impose a mask mandate, saw cumulative excess deaths rise by 6.8%, the lowest figure in the OECD. By way of comparison, the equivalent figures were 18% in Australia, 24.5% in the U.K., and 54.1% in the U.S.
At this stage, various authoritarians, hypochondriacs and mask fetishists trot out bizarre arguments about Sweden having a low population density, as if Swedes were evenly spaced across their birch forests rather than living mainly in cities comparable to ours. What is striking about this argument is not so much its dishonesty (in March 2020, lockdowners claimed that Sweden faced total catastrophe, not that it might end up with a slightly higher mortality rate than Finland ) as its desperation.
The lockdowns were not for really naught, however. They facilitated an enormous transfer of wealth and political power from the middle- and working-class to big corporations and the professional/managerial class.
DEMS PREPARE IRS TO CRUSH EVANGELICALS: Buried in the laughably titled “Respect for Marriage Act” now before the Senate are provisions authorizing the IRS to jerk tax-exemption from any church or non-profit social service agency that refuses to support the LGBQT agenda regarding marriage.
What will come in the months following enactment will be a swarm of gay couples demanding that evangelical pastors perform wedding ceremonies that many of them will refuse, as a matter of faith, to do. There will similarly be gay couples demanding that religious-based adoption agencies that only match orphans with intact heterosexual couples abandon their beliefs.
In other words, the full force of the federal government is being prepared for the assault on tax-exempt churches and church-related social service agencies that liberals have dreamed of for decades.
UPDATE: Sen. James Lankford explains in detail why Respect for Marriage Act threatens religious liberty:
RESPECT FOR MARRIAGE ACT HAS NONE FOR 1ST AMENDMENT: Senators Kevin Cramer of North Dakota and James Lankford of Oklahoma, plus multiple civil liberties advocates who specialize in freedom of speech and religion issues, say Schumer’s same-sex marriage vehicle is jam-packed with destructiveness.
JOHN STOSSEL: The US ‘Has the Most Mass Shootings’—and Other Bogus Gun Research.
Last year, they claimed that there were school shootings at “hundreds of schools.” It was “an almost daily occurrence” in the U.S., some said.
This was nonsense. NPR reporters looked into the 235 shootings reported by the U.S. Department of Education and were only able to confirm 11 of them.
It turned out that schools were added to the list merely because someone at a school heard there may have been a shooting. Good for NPR for checking out the Education Department’s claims.
Economist John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center (and the father of one of my producers), spends much of his time researching gun use and correcting shoddy studies.
A few years ago, much of the media claimed that the U.S. has “the most mass shootings of any country in the world.” Then-President Barack Obama added it’s “a pattern now … that has no parallel anywhere else … .”
CNN and the Los Angeles Times wrote about “Why the U.S. Has the Most Mass Shootings.” (“The United States has more guns.”)
But the U.S. doesn’t have the most mass shootings, says Lott. It’s a myth created by University of Alabama associate professor Adam Lankford, a myth repeated by anti-gun media in hundreds of news stories.
“Lankford claimed that since 1966, there were 90 mass public shooters in the United States, more than any other country,” says Lott. “Lankford claimed ‘complete data’ were available from 171 countries.”
But how could that be? Many governments don’t collect such data, and even fewer have information from before the days of the internet.
A shooting in say, India, would likely be reported only in local newspapers, in a local dialect. How would Lankford ever find out about it? How did he collect his information? What languages did he search in?
He won’t say.
“That’s academic malpractice,” says Lott in my video about the controversy.
I’m not surprised that Lankford didn’t reply to Lott’s emails. Lott is known as pro-gun. (He wrote the book “More Guns, Less Crime.”) But Lankford also won’t explain his data to me, The Washington Post, or even his fellow gun control advocates.
When Lott’s research center checked the data, using Lankford’s own definition of a mass shooting—“four or more people killed”—the center found 3,000 shootings around the world. Lankford claimed there were only 202.
Lankford said he excludes “sponsored terrorism,” but does not define what he means by that. To be safe, Lott removed terrorism cases from his data. He still found 709 shootings—more than triple the number Lankford reported.
It turns out that not only did the U.S. not have the most frequent mass shootings, it was No. 62 on the list, lower than places like Norway, Finland, and Switzerland.
There was also no relationship between the rate of gun ownership in different countries and the rate of mass shootings.
If journalists had just demanded Lankford explain his study methods before touting his results, his “more mass shootings” myth would never have spread.
But they wanted it to spread.
DISPATCHES FROM THE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARY: Biden HHS Instructing Employees to Watch Their Pronouns, Leaked Documents Show.
Last June, when Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Xavier Becerra appeared before the Senate Finance Committee to testify on the Biden administration’s fiscal 2022 budget, one brief interchange stood out: Toward the end of the hearing, Oklahoma GOP senator James Lankford confronted Becerra on an odd shift in the White House budget proposal’s language. “I noticed you changed a term in your budget work,” Lankford said. “You shifted, in places, from using the term ‘mother’ to ‘birthing people.’ Can you help me get a good definition of ‘birthing people’?”
Becerra demurred. “Well, I’ll check on the language there, but I think if we’re talking about those who give birth, I think we’re talking about, uh . . . I don’t know how else to explain it to you.” The removal of the term “mother,” the HHS secretary maintained, “simply reflects the work that’s being done.”
Becerra neglected to discuss the specific nature of that work. But internal documents obtained by National Review confirm that the administration’s gender-neutral language coincides with a coordinated effort at HHS to implement a new set of rules and standards regarding “equity” and “gender-inclusive correspondence.” The guidance, issued last year, does not specifically cover “birthing people” but does prescribe the use of a number of other gender-neutral terms, often valuing pronoun sensitivity over clarity in official correspondence.
* * * * * * * *
The new standard on gender-inclusive correspondence instructs HHS employees to “use gender-neutral salutations and forms of address only.” That includes omitting “gendered courtesy titles (Mr., Mrs., Ms.)” in address blocks and in salutations. (“Instead, write ‘Dear,’ followed by the individual’s name, followed by a colon,” the document suggests.) It goes further, advising against gendered pronouns and other terms when in doubt — and even suggesting using the so-called “singular ‘they’” instead:
When writing to an individual whose name is unknown, avoid using gendered salutations (e.g., Dear Sir/Madam). Refer to the context of the communication to identify a suitable, gender-neutral alternative (e.g., Dear colleague, Dear recipient). Similarly, when addressing a group, avoid gendered language (e.g., Dear Sirs/Madams), opting instead for collective salutations that are gender neutral.
In the body of the letter, avoid using masculine or feminine pronouns (he, she) to refer to individuals whose gender or preferred pronouns are unknown. Instead, consider using the individual’s preferred name; using the singular “they,” “them,” and “theirs” pronouns; or using sentence constructions that avoid the use of pronouns.
Flashback: Trans English is the new common tongue. Refinery29 and GLAAD have torn up the dictionary.
“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”
ROGER SIMON: Can Rand Paul Save the Senate?
Every day in every way I like Rand Paul better. He gives libertarianism a good name by standing for something, unlike almost all his colleagues, right and left.
Just the other day he stood up to the tedious hyper-partisanship of ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.
Tuesday he weighed in, to great effect, on the impeachment issue, although I suspect it wasn’t just his impassioned and eloquent speech, a point of order actually, that swung 45 Republican senators to his side.
The Kentucky senator pointed out the obvious, calling the Democrats’ second impeachment charade utterly unconstitutional and forcing the one hundred lawmakers to stand up and be counted on the question.
The result was 45 out of 50 Republican senators—whether reluctantly or not we will never know—agreed with him, making the coming trial moot (the two-thirds necessary for conviction nearly impossible) and most likely an embarrassment to the politically bloodthirsty Democrats and their addled president who keeps telling us he wants to bring us together.
But, as I mentioned, something else was going on.
As important, possibly more, was the new poll Rasmussen took for John Solomon’s Just the News of an imaginary 2024 presidential election. It’s ridiculously early, of course, but it showed Donald Trump’s as yet nonexistent Patriot party garnering 23 percent of the vote to the Republicans 17 percent. (The Democrats were at 46% with “other”—whatever that is— winning 14 percent, barely trailing the Republicans.)
This wasn’t really surprising—not to me and probably not to most of you—but it apparently was to a group of seemingly-clueless Republican senators who only a few days ago registered the possibility that they might vote to convict a president of their own party who was not even still in office.
The poll must have scared the proverbial bejesus out of them. Anyway it should have.
So we won’t forget the original Republican reprobates, they were, according to a Jan. 25, 2021 report here at The Epoch Times:
Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.)
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)
Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.)
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine)
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska)
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah)
Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.)
Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio)
Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska)
Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.)
Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.)
Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho)
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.)
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.)
Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.)
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.)
How quickly things change. After Tuesday’s vote, sixteen were reduced to five in a flash!
Only Collins and Murkowski (perpetual outsiders), Toomey (not running for reelection), Sasse (looking for QAnon under every rock) and, of course, Romney remain. Call them The Five (not to be confused with Greg Gutfeld et. al.).
We needn’t belabor that only a day or so ago newly-ensconced minority leader McConnell was touting the inevitability of a trial he just voted against as unconstitutional. How embarrassing.
Another list exists at the same Epoch Times article of those whose leanings we did not know, at least yesterday. Today, of course, we can assume that are all squarely in Trump’s camp.
Whether it was Rand Paul or Rasmussen that finally woke those people up is ultimately irrelevant.
What is relevant is how few of them stood up for Donald Trump during what we might call “crunch time,” when he needed them to support Sens. Hawley and Cruz in their attempt to get a measly ten-day period with which to study the allegations of election fraud to see if they amounted to anything.
As Ed Morrissey wrote yesterday, Rand Paul can’t derail the Senate trial, but he “can take all of the suspense out of it” – and did just that.
WE DON’T HAVE A LACK OF CONFIDENCE. WE KNOW FOR A FACT THIS FARCE OF AN ELECTION IS LEADING US TO PUT A FRAUDULENT (AND EXTREME LEFT) GOVERNMENT IN PLACE. WE KNOW THAT THESE PEOPLE WILL NEVER LET US HAVE AN HONEST ELECTION AGAIN: Senator James Lankford Outlines Concerns With Voter Confidence in 2020 Election Outcome.
You know what could have fixed it? The courts taking the cases and allowing for an examination of the evidence. The fact that cases keep getting dismissed on “standing” issues, and/or delayed indefinitely, and that social media has banned any mention of fraud? It only makes absolutely sure we have no doubts at all that there was massive fraud. Because no honest system would behave the way the left and its surrogates are behaving. Every time they ban mention of something? It’s because it’s a truth they’re trying to hide.
So, dear Senators, that horse is out of the barn. Now what you have to concern yourselves with is what We The People will do. It will be multiple surprises. It will be amazing. Just wait.
THE BUDGET PROBLEM WASHINGTON DARE NOT MENTION: It’s the unfunded future obligations under Social Security, Medicare and other entitlements that make the national debt $122 trillion, not the officially cited figure of $23 trillion.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) had an otherwise-excellent summit on the budget Tuesday that featured Senate Budget Committee Chairman Mike Enzi (R-WY), Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehosue (D-RI), plus key Senate and House budget panel staffers going back to 1985.
But nobody said anything about that $122 trillion monster lurking in the “out years” that won’t be out sooner than anybody thinks.
POOR GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS JUST CAN’T KEEP UP WITH THE OKIE SENATOR: The ABC News host and former inner circle Clintonista becomes Sunday lunch for Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.).
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Republican senators introduce Equal Campus Access Act to protect students’ religious freedom.
Three Republican senators have proposed legislation in an effort to protect college students’ freedom of religion on campus.
The Higher Education Act of 1965, which sets many of the federal government’s policies on higher education, is currently up for renewal.
With that, U.S. Senators James Lankford (R-Oklahoma), Roy Blunt (R-Missouri) and Tim Scott (R-South Carolina), introduced in April the Equal Campus Access Act of 2019 as an amendment to the HEA.
The proposed amendment states: “None of the funds made available under this Act may be provided to any public institution of higher education that denies to a religious student organization any right, benefit, or privilege that is otherwise afforded to other student organizations at the institution (including full access to the facilities of the institution and official recognition of the organization by the institution) because of the religious beliefs, practices, speech, leadership standards, or standards of conduct of the religious student organization.”
Sen. Lankford said the measure aims to force administrators to respect students’ religious beliefs and their right to choose their group’s leaders.
Joe Cohn, legislative and policy director for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, told The College Fix in a phone interview that while the bill is a good first step they would like to see expanded protections.
“FIRE is happy to see the Senate is considering adding protections for student organizations,” but the group would like to see lawmakers’ efforts “expanded to protect all belief or advocacy-based organizations,” Cohn said.
I agree.
FLASHBACK: NPR (!) ON “THE SCHOOL SHOOTINGS THAT WEREN’T.”
This spring the U.S. Education Department reported that in the 2015-2016 school year, “nearly 240 schools … reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting.” The number is far higher than most other estimates.
But NPR reached out to every one of those schools repeatedly over the course of three months and found that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened. Child Trends, a nonpartisan nonprofit research organization, assisted NPR in analyzing data from the government’s Civil Rights Data Collection.
We were able to confirm just 11 reported incidents, either directly with schools or through media reports.
Related: America doesn’t actually lead the world in mass shootings.
The claim that the US has by far the most mass public shootings in the world drives much of the gun-control debate. Many argue that America’s high rate of gun possession explains the high rate of mass shootings.
“The one thing we do know is that we have a pattern now of mass shootings in this country that has no parallel anywhere else in the world,” President Barack Obama warned us. To justify this claim and many other similar quotes, Obama’s administration cited a then-unpublished paper by criminologist Adam Lankford.
Lankford’s claim received coverage in hundreds of news stories all over the world. It still gets regular coverage. Purporting to cover all mass public shootings around the world from 1966 to 2012, Lankford claimed that the United States had 31 percent of public mass shooters despite having less than 5 percent of the population.
But this isn’t nearly correct. The whole episode should provide a cautionary tale of academic malpractice and how evidence is often cherry-picked and not questioned when it fits preconceived ideas. . . .
Of the 86 countries where we have identified mass public shootings, the US ranks 56th per capita in its rate of attacks and 61st in mass public shooting murder rate. Norway, Finland, Switzerland and Russia all have at least 45 percent higher rates of murder from mass public shootings than the United States.
When Lankford’s data is revised, the relationship between gun ownership rates and mass public shooters disappears.
How could that be? One possibility is that guns don’t just enable mass shooters; gun owners can also deter and prevent such shootings. Another is that culture — not gun ownership — is a bigger factor in shootings.
The media should be wary of any researchers who fail to let others look at their data.
Well, you know, unless the researchers help the narrative along.
PAUL MIRENGOFF: “Chai Feldblum Is Finally Out at the EEOC.”
I know Chai Feldblum a bit. She is a nice, upbeat woman who has kindly agreed to debate conservatives at Federalist Society events on a number of occasions. For that, I thank her. It isn’t easy to get Progressives to debate race and sex issues at Federalist Society events.
Nevertheless, I agree with Paul that her parting shot on twitter illustrates why Sen. Lee, Sen. Lankford and others were right to oppose her reappointment. She wrote:
Today at noon my commission on the EEOC expires. What a wonderful almost nine-year run I have had! TY to all who worked so hard on my confirmation. We certainly gave it our best shot. Now we must fight even harder for diversity, safety, and equity. There is no other way!
Her job at the EEOC was not to fight for diversity, safety, and equity. It was to enforce the law as written—a task she and her Progressive colleagues strayed from too often. Alas, the EEOC has become renowned for exceeding the law as written. Here, for example, is an amicus brief that discusses the EEOC’s wrongheaded policy on hiring job applicants with criminal records.
It is also worth pointing out that the Trump Administration’s efforts to appoint a non-lawyer to the EEOC position was a mistake. Chai Feldblum would have run circles around a non-lawyer, even a very smart one. The position calls for someone who knows the law in that area. I nominate Paul Mirengoff.
SO MANY LIES PASS FOR NEWS: US accounts for just 1% of mass shootings, not media-hyped 31%.. “Lankford’s study reported that from 1966 to 2012, there were 90 public mass shooters in the United States and 202 in the rest of world. We find that Lankford’s data represent a gross undercount of foreign attacks. Our list contains 1,448 attacks and at least 3,081 shooters outside the United States over just the last 15 years of the period that Lankford examined. We find at least fifteen times more mass public shooters than Lankford in less than a third the number of years,.”
ED MORRISSEY: Senate GOP Getting Ready For Another Big Rule Change?
It’s not the rule change Donald Trump wants, but it might be more effective. Having allowed Senate Democrats to slow and obstruct confirmation of presidential nominees for more than a year, Senate Republicans came out of a caucus meeting hinting that changes are afoot:
Senate Republicans, frustrated by delaying tactics imposed by Democrats on President Trump’s judicial and executive branch nominees, are on the verge of altering the Senate rules in order to speed up the process.
GOP lawmakers told the Washington Examiner Tuesday that momentum is building for a change in the Senate rules that would shorten the time frame allowed for lawmakers to debate each nominee.
One proposal by Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., would reinstate a temporary rules change made by Democrats in 2013 that reduced debate time from 30 hours to eight hours for most executive branch nominations and from 30 hours to two hours for lower judicial branch nominations.
Republicans have talked about these rule changes for months. Mitch McConnell was reportedly ready to act last fall, only to back away after Chuck Schumer accused him of coming to the debate with “unclean hands.” That has to qualify as one of the least self-reflective statements ever, of course, and McConnell’s retreat did nothing to incentivize Democrats to end their stalling routines.
If there’s even a chance that the GOP Senate majority goes away in January, they ought to be doing everything they can to speed things up until then.
HAVE THEY BEEN READING GLENN REYNOLDS? New bill could finally get rid of paperless voting machines.
Computer scientists have been warning for more than a decade that these machines are vulnerable to hacking and can’t be meaningfully audited. States have begun moving away from paperless systems, but budget constraints have forced some to continue relying on insecure paperless equipment. The Secure Elections Act would give states grants specifically earmarked for replacing these systems with more secure systems that use voter-verified paper ballots.
The legislation’s second big idea is to encourage states to perform routine post-election audits based on modern statistical techniques. Many states today only conduct recounts in the event of very close election outcomes. And these recounts involve counting a fixed percentage of ballots. That often leads to either counting way too many ballots (wasting taxpayer money) or too few (failing to fully verify the election outcome).
The Lankford bill would encourage states to adopt more statistically sophisticated procedures to count as many ballots as needed to verify an election result was correct—and no more.
We talked to two election security experts who praised the legislation and urged Congress to pass it quickly.
All is proceeding exactly as Glenn has foreseen.
WILL DEMOCRATS END THEIR FILIBUSTER? Congress returns for brief, election-year session with Zika funding, avoiding shutdown topping its list.
Flashback: The Hill: Senate Democrats block Zika agreement ahead of recess.
Senate Democrats on Tuesday blocked a deal providing funding for the fight against the Zika virus, virtually guaranteeing that Congress won’t get legislation to President Obama’s desk this month.
In a 52-48 vote, the Senate fell eight votes short of moving past a procedural hurdle against the House-Senate conference report on a military and veterans spending bill, which includes $1.1 billion to fund the Zika virus research.
Sen. Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.) broke with his party and backed moving forward with the deal. GOP Sens. James Lankford (R-Okla.), Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) voted against the Zika deal. McConnell’s “no” vote allows him to bring the measure back up for another vote.
The vote leaves the current fight over the Zika virus at a standstill with days left before the July 4th recess.
The Dem line now is that the GOP is holding things up — by not doing what the Dem minority wants. It never goes that way when the parties are reversed. . . .