Group items tagged

Nearly 100 million people cast their ballots early, more than two-thirds of the total number of votes cast in the 2016 election.

Polls will begin closing at 6 p.m. Eastern in parts of Kentucky and Indiana, and the first results will begin rolling in soon after that. Both are securely in the Trump column.

If Mr. Biden wins Georgia, Florida or North Carolina, Mr. Trump has an even slimmer path to victory.

Madison Cawthorn, a 25-year-old Trump-loving conservative, is projected to win the North Carolina House seat once held by Mark Meadows, now White House chief of staff.

Cawthorn’s campaign issued a statement calling out Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive firebrand from New York City who at 31 is currently the youngest member of Congress. He had previously said that Ocasio-Cortez’s rise inspired him to run.

Cawthorn, who became paralyzed from the waist down in a car accident in 2014, has been a controversial candidate. During the campaign, he was accused of sexual misconduct, an allegation he said was politically motivated. He acknowledging the encounter but said he was acting “just in a flirtatious way.”

President Donald Trump will accept the Republican presidential nomination outside North Carolina, the party said on Wednesday, following the Democratic governor’s decision not to lift social-distancing restrictions for the planned Aug. 24-27 convention.

On Tuesday, Governor Roy Cooper rejected Republican demands to guarantee that attendance at the convention in Charlotte would not be restricted by social-distancing measures aimed at preventing the spread of the coronavirus.

“We are working to schedule visits to these cities by Republican National Committee officials in the coming days,” the official said.

Whoever wins the presidential race can use the full power of the presidency only if he has a Senate backing him up. Currently, Republicans hold 53 of 100 seats.

Democrats need a net gain of three seats

it looks like Democrats are going to get a majority, but the battle for control remains close and will likely be determined by two related factors:

Billy Graham, the famous preacher who reached millions of people around the world through his Christian ministry, died on Wednesday at 99. Over the course of more than six decades, he reshaped the landscape of evangelism, sharing the gospel from North Carolina to North Korea and developing innovative ways to communicate the message of the Bible. He influenced generations of pastors and developed friendships with presidents, prime ministers, and royalty around the world. His death marks the end of an era for evangelicalism, and poses a fundamental question: Will his legacy of bipartisan, ecumenical outreach be carried forward?

Although the term “evangelical” is now commonly used to refer to Christians who focus on personal salvation and outreach about the gospel, it wasn’t always so common. “Billy was sort of the original evangelical,” argued Jack Graham, the pastor of Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas, who serves with Laurie on President Trump’s unofficial evangelical advisory council. (He’s not related to Billy Graham.) The North Carolina preacher was focused on evangelism, or sharing the good news of the gospel. As he grew more popular, he became the face of the movement to many around the United States and the world.

He was also firmly committed to remaining bipartisan, proudly claiming that he provided spiritual counsel to 12 sitting presidents and participated in events surrounding nine inauguration ceremonies. “Billy had great influence on people from every side of the aisle, politically,” said Jack Graham. “To me, he reminds us always that more important than partisan politics, more important than the political divisions that we have today, that Christ can unite us.” Even President Trump met Graham, before he won the White House: Laurie said the now-president sat with the preacher at Graham’s 95th birthday party.

The last time North Carolina Republicans redrew the state’s 13 congressional districts, they made absolutely no secret of their ambition to rig the system and lock in a 10-3 balance in their favour – regardless of whether they or the Democrats won a majority of the votes in future elections.

The court ordered the legislature to come up with new, fairer maps within two weeks and said if they did not, a court-appointed expert would redraw the maps for them.

Cunningham, who is married, admitted to exchanging romantic texts with California woman Arlene Guzman Todd after the messages leaked. Guzman Todd later told The Associated Press that they had a physical affair.

“Clearly, our Senate race is the big one. For a while in the summer, it looked like Cunningham might be running away with this thing,” e

1. He is a lawyer and businessman

Reconstruction (1865-1877), the turbulent era following the Civil War, was the effort to reintegrate Southern states from the Confederacy and 4 million newly-freed people into the United States. Under the administration of President Andrew Johnson in 1865 and 1866, new southern state legislatures passed restrictive “Black Codes” to

At the outset of the Civil War, to the dismay of the more radical abolitionists in the North, President Abraham Lincoln did not make abolition of slavery a goal of the Union war effort. To do so, he feared, would drive the border slave states still loyal to the Union into the Confederacy and anger more conservative northerners. By the summer of 1862, however, enslaved people, themselves had pushed the issue, heading by the thousands to the Union lines as Lincoln’s troops marched through the South. 

Their actions debunked one of the strongest myths underlying Southern devotion to the “peculiar institution”—that many enslaved people were truly content in bondage—and convinced Lincoln that emancipation had become a political and military necessity. In response to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which freed more than 3 million enslaved people in the Confederate states by January 1, 1863, Black people enlisted in the Union Army in large numbers, reaching some 180,000 by war’s end.

Even for those who are convinced that President Trump must go, the prospect of impeaching him is daunting.In part, that’s because Trump is already calling his critics “spies” and “savages” and has warned of a civil war if the charges against him move forward.

The deeper reason there is so much uncertainty around impeachment is because no sitting president has ever actually been thrown out of office for high crimes and misdemeanors.

Except that it has happened, to another real estate mogul turned politician with improper ties to foreign leaders. It’s just that he was a senator, not a president.

The tools that broke American democracy were not just the Ku Klux Klan’s white sheets, vigilantes’ Red Shirts, and lynch mobs’ nooses; they were devices we still encounter when we vote today: the registration roll and the secret, official ballot.

Along with exclusions of felons and permanent resident aliens, these methods swept the entire United States in the late 19th century, reducing nationwide voter participation from about 80 percent to below 50 percent by the 1920s.

turnout in the United States has never recovered; by one 2018 survey, the country ranks 26th of 32 developed democracies in participation.

In his victory speech, the president-elect said of Black voters: “You’ve always had my back, and I’ll have yours.” Many of those voters are watching to see what he does in office.

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. — Joseph R. Biden Jr. went to the Royal Missionary Baptist Church in South Carolina in late February, before the state’s presidential primary, and listened as the Rev. Isaac J. Holt Jr. delivered a message of encouragement.

In South Carolina, the state that helped propel Mr. Biden to the Democratic nomination and where about half of the Democratic electorate is Black, voters complain of receiving campaign promises from politicians while they are running but not being prioritized once they are elected.

statements

For nearly four years, congressional Republicans have ducked and dodged an unending cascade of offensive statements and norm-shattering behavior from President Trump, ignoring his caustic and scattershot Twitter feed and penchant for flouting party orthodoxy, and standing quietly by as he abandoned military allies, attacked American institutions and stirred up racist and nativist fears.

But now, facing grim polling numbers and a flood of Democratic money and enthusiasm that has imperiled their majority in the Senate, Republicans on Capitol Hill are beginning to publicly distance themselves from the president.

firebombing of a North Carolina Republican headquarters

“an attack on our democracy,”

“political terrorism.”

for liberals, the successes in cross-party activism and intersectional dialogue in North Carolina cannot be ignored. Perhaps that approach can be expanded nationally by thinking of fluid intersections, and emphasizing morality and empathy instead of rigid class hierarchies and pure economic self-interest. If the governor’s race is any example, Democrats and progressive allies can fight their next fight without losing or diminishing their identities.

I couldn’t help noticing the contemporary resonances of some Roman history — specifically, the tale of how the Roman Republic fell.

Here’s what I learned: Republican institutions don’t protect against tyranny when powerful people start defying political norms. And tyranny, when it comes, can flourish even while maintaining a republican facade

On the first point: Roman politics involved fierce competition among ambitious men. But for centuries that competition was constrained by some seemingly unbreakable rule

SPECIALTY license plates — which bear the logo of a college or a sports team, or a slogan like “Save Our Seas” or “Stop Child Abuse” — bring in lots of money for state governments, as well as the schools, nonprofit groups, professional organizations and other entities that sponsor them. But these vehicular tags have also become a new frontier in debates over freedom of speech.

It wants Texas to issue a specialty plate showing the Confederate battle flag, which a state panel rejected. The group argues that if Texas allows plates that express some opinions, it also must allow the battle flag, even if the symbol offends many people. Anything less, the group says, amounts to discrimination against its viewpoint, in violation of the First Amendment.

In 2011, the State Legislature approved a specialty plate with the slogan “Choose Life.” Those who seek this specialized plate pay $25, $10 of which goes to the state’s highway fund and $15 of which goes to a pregnancy counseling organization. But when the Legislature refused to issue an abortion-rights plate, the American Civil Liberties Union sued.

the slaveholders did not need to invent the Electoral College to fend off direct popular election of the president. Direct election did have some influential supporters, including Gouverneur Morris of New York, author of the Constitution’s preamble. But the convention, deeply suspicious of what one Virginian in another context called “the fury of democracy,” crushed the proposal on two separate occasions.

how much did the slaveholding states rush to support the concept of presidential electors? Not at all. In the initial vote over having electors select the president, the only states voting “nay” were North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia — the three most ardently proslavery states in the convention.

outherners didn’t embrace the idea of electors because it might enlarge slavery’s power; they feared, as the North Carolinian Hugh Williamson, who was not a slaveholder, remarked, that the men chosen as electors would be corruptible “persons not occupied in the high offices of government.” Pro-elite concerns were on their minds

The number of confirmed cases of Covid-19 continues to grow in the US. Mike Pence, the vice-president, is overseeing the US response to the coronavirus.

Confirmed cases 85,919 (Today: +2,083) Deaths 1,297 (Today: +88)

State/territory Confirmed cases Deaths New York 39,140 461 New Jersey 6,876 81 California 4,040 82 Washington 3,207 150 Michigan 2,844 61 Illinois 2,542 26 Florida 2,484 29 Massachusetts 2,417 25 Louisiana 2,304 83 Pennsylvania 1,813 18 Texas 1,658 24 Georgia 1,642 56 Colorado 1,430 19 Tennessee 1,097 3 Connecticut 1,012 21 Ohio 870 15 North Carolina 755 3 Wisconsin 728 10 Indiana 657 17 Maryland 583 4 Nevada 536 10 Alabama 531 1 Missouri 520 9 Arizona 508 8 Mississippi 485 6 Virginia 468 10 South Carolina 456 9 Utah 396 1 Arkansas 349 2 Minnesota 344 2 Oregon 317 11 District of Columbia 267 3 Oklahoma 248 7 Kentucky 247 5 Idaho 191 3 Iowa 179 1 Kansas 172 3 Rhode Island 165 0 Vermont 158 9 Maine 155 0 New Hampshire 154 1 Delaware 143 1 New Mexico 136 1 Hawaii 106 0 Montana 90 1 Nebraska 82 0 West Virginia 76 0 Puerto Rico 64 2 North Dakota 57 0 Alaska 56 1 Wyoming 56 0 South Dakota 46 1 Guam 45 1 Virgin Islands 17 0