Scott Boehmer

Tag: Election 2024

  • 2024 NC Elections Finally Over

    After spending over six months vigorously contesting his narrow loss in the 2024 North Carolina Supreme Court election, Jefferson Griffin conceded the race on Wednesday following a federal judge’s ruling against him.

    Griffin, a Republican judge on the state Court of Appeals, lost the election to Democratic incumbent Allison Riggs by 734 votes. But he and the state Republican Party refused to accept the results, instead embarking on an unprecedented campaign to challenge over 65,000 votes in a legal battle that has roiled the state and drawn national rebuke.

    Earlier this week, Chief U.S. District Judge Richard E. Myers, an appointee of President Donald Trump, decisively ruled against Griffin’s efforts, saying that he sought to “change the rules of the game after it had been played.”

    Kyle Ingram

    Griffin concedes NC Supreme Court race, ending unprecedented effort to overturn election (The News & Observer)

  • Emulating Trump’s Lack of Decency

    Even the way people on Wall Street talk and interact is changing. Bankers and financiers say Trump’s victory has emboldened those who chafed at “woke doctrine” and felt they had to self-censor or change their language to avoid offending younger colleagues, women, minorities or disabled people.

    “I feel liberated,” said a top banker. “We can say ‘r****d’ and ‘p***y’ without the fear of getting cancelled . . . it’s a new dawn.”

    Some Wall Streeters also feel able to embrace making money openly, without nodding to any broader social goals. “Most of us don’t have to kiss ass because, like Trump, we love America and capitalism,” one said.

    FT Reporters

    Is corporate America going Maga? (Financial Times)

  • By “Personal Responsibility” We Meant “Impunity”

    Decades ago, people in Trump’s orbit, such as Roy Cohn and Roger Stone, taught him that rules are malleable, that winning is all that matters. Democrats, however, are by and large a party of rule followers. Despite being forced out of the race by his own party, President Joe Biden is still an institutionalist. There he was, smiling next to Trump, the man whom he had characterized as an “existential threat.” Biden’s courtesies, his adherence to norms, extend all the way down. Susie Wiles, Trump’s former co–campaign manager, said that Biden’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients, has been “very helpful” to her, and that he has gone so far as to host a dinner for her and others at his home.

    Opposition party this is not. The Democrats are playing one game, and Trump is playing another. Trump is winning.

    John Hendrickson

    Trump’s Rule-Breaking Keeps Working (The Atlantic)

    As Republicans whitewashed January 6 and the legal system failed to hold Trump to account, the importance of Trump’s attack on our democracy seemed to fade. Even the Trump v. U.S. Supreme Court decision, which undermined the key principle that all Americans are equal before the law by declaring Trump above it, got less attention than its astonishingly revolutionary position warranted, coming as it did just four days after President Joe Biden looked and sounded old in a televised presidential debate.

    Heather Cox Richardson

    January 6, 2025 (Letters from an American)

    A federal judge dismissed the Jan. 6 election interference case against Donald Trump hours after federal prosecutors filed a motion to dismiss both that case and the Mar-a-Lago documents cases against Trump.

    Judge Tanya Chutkan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed the case without prejudice.

    The move was widely expected. Just a day after the election, special counsel Jack Smith, who headed the investigations, began to unwind the federal cases against Trump: the first for clinging to power in 2020, events that resulted in the storming of the U.S. Capitol; the second for hoarding classified documents and obstructing FBI efforts to retrieve them.

    NPR Washington Desk

    Judge grants dismissal of Jan. 6 case against Trump (NPR)

    There is little in the part of the report covering Trump’s behavior that was not already public information. The report explains how Trump lied that he won the 2020 presidential election and continued to lie even when his own appointees and employees told him he had lost. It lays out how he pressured state officials to throw out votes for his opponent, then-president-elect Joe Biden, and how he and his cronies recruited false electors in key states Trump lost to create slates of false electoral votes.

    It explains how Trump tried to force Justice Department officials to support his lie and to trick states into rescinding their electoral votes for Biden and how, finally, he pressured his vice president, Mike Pence, to either throw out votes for Biden or send state counts back to the states. When Pence refused, correctly asserting that he had no such power, Trump urged his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol. He refused to call them off for hours.

    Smith explained that the Justice Department concluded that Trump was guilty on four counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States by trying “to interfere with or obstruct one of its lawful governmental functions by deceit, craft or trickery, or at least by means that are dishonest”; obstruction and conspiracy to obstruct by creating false evidence; and conspiracy against rights by trying to take away people’s right to vote for president.

    Heather Cox Richardson

    January 14, 2025 (Letters from an American)

    Appearing in court virtually from his Mar-a-Lago home Friday [10 January 2025], President-elect Donald Trump was sentenced for his crimes in the New York “hush money” case and released with no restrictions.

    Justice Juan Merchan followed through on a promise made one week ago to give Trump a sentence of unconditional discharge, which includes neither jail time nor any other restriction that might impede Trump after his inauguration on Jan. 20.

    Graham Kates, Kathryn Watson, Katrina Kaufman, Shawna Mizelle, Nathalie Nieves

    Far from expressing any kind of remorse for his criminal conduct, the defendant has purposefully bred disdain for our judicial institutions and the rule of law, and he’s done this to serve his own ends, and to encourage others to reject the jury verdict that he finds so distasteful.

    Joshua Steinglass, Prosecutor

    Trump sentenced in felony “hush money” case, released with no restrictions (CBS News)

    In a historic decision, a divided Supreme Court on Monday [1 July 2024] ruled that former presidents can never be prosecuted for actions relating to the core powers of their office, and that there is at least a presumption that they have immunity for their official acts more broadly.

    Amy Howe

    Justices rule Trump has some immunity from prosecution (SCOTUSblog)

  • Will Republicans Steal the North Carolina Supreme Court Election?

    The State Board of Elections’s final count shows Justice Allison Riggs, the Democratic incumbent in the race, to be the winner, by a margin of 734 votes out of the more than 5.5 million ballots that were cast. But Judge Griffin, the North Carolina Republican Party and conservative election deniers have embarked on an extraordinary effort to wipe away that result, and throw out tens of thousands of ballots that were submitted by mail or in early voting.

    …

    On Tuesday, the State Supreme Court blocked state officials from certifying the outcome of the race. Later this month, pending the outcome of legal battles over whether the issue should be heard in state or federal courts, the North Carolina court could decide, in effect, whether a Democrat or a Republican will hold the seat.

    Eduardo Medina and Michael Wines

    In North Carolina, Republicans Try to Reverse a Supreme Court Election Loss (The New York Times)

    The Supreme Court of North Carolina has been asked to rule on a bizarre request from Jefferson Griffin, the losing Republican challenger for an Associate Justice seat on that same court. Last week, the Griffin campaign filed a request for the state’s highest court to toss out 60,000 votes, thus reversing the outcome of the election which Griffin lost. In doing so, Jefferson Griffin’s crusade against the voters of North Carolina is not only anti-democratic, but anathema to the rule of law.

    Simply put, this is a grim preview of North Carolina’s political future. Should Griffin’s request be granted, North Carolina’s already threadbare democracy could be irreparably torn. Overturning the will of the voters in a valid election is a major escalation from ordinary partisan politics, and should be roundly condemned across the political spectrum.

    Carolina Forward Research Staff

    A choice of democracy (Carolina Forward)

    Democracy Docket has an interview with Justice Allison Riggs about this situation that you can watch here:

    The GOP is Trying to Steal a North Carolina Supreme Court Seat (Democracy Docket)

    If you’re in North Carolina and want to check if your vote is one of the votes that Jefferson Griffin is trying to disqualify, Apex Council Member Terry Mahaffey has made a tool to allow you to check: https://terrymah.github.io/challenge/

  • Silicon Valley Heads to Mar-a-Lago

    When Zuckerberg visited Mar-a-Lago on the evening before Thanksgiving, he and other guests reportedly stood with hands over hearts while listening to a recording of the national anthem sung by people accused of January 6–related crimes. Whether Zuckerberg knew who the singers were is unclear. But the scene was uncanny given that January 6, when it happened, was a bright-red line for the tech industry. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitch banned or suspended Trump, and companies such as Amazon paused donations to election deniers. Now, with the arrival of Trump 2.0, that red line has been erased entirely.

    Lora Kelley

    Silicon Valley Heads to Mar-a-Lago (The Atlantic)

  • Why Billionaires Obey in Advance

    The Trump administration is being actively taught right now that it can expect the full cooperation of the leaders of industry. Why are they offering themselves without being asked? Because that’s what they’re trained for.

    The myth of the moral billionaire has dogged me my entire career. For years I’ve been reassured by people inside and outside the power structure of Silicon Valley that the moral judgement of people at the top of major companies was so reliable that it required no real oversight.

    Jacob Ward

    Why Billionaires Obey in Advance (The Rip Current)

  • NC GOP Sore Losers

    On the brink of losing their supermajority in the state legislature, North Carolina Republicans overrode a gubernatorial veto on Wednesday to enact a new law that gives them control over elections in the state and strips the incoming Democratic governor and attorney general of some of their powers.

    Sam Levine

    Unfortunately, Western North Carolina had to watch as every Republican in the general assembly shamelessly put their desire to strip political power away from recently elected Democrats ahead of the aid and relief their communities need. Using the guise of Hurricane Helene relief is a new low, even for general assembly Republicans.

    Anderson Clayton, Chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party

    North Carolina GOP lawmakers override veto to strip power from Democratic officials (The Guardian)

  • How North Carolina’s Gerrymandering Affects the Nation

    Here’s the reality: the congressional map we used to have, with a 7-7 Republican-Democratic split, reflected the true political makeup of our state. It was fair. It gave voters on both sides confidence that their voices mattered. But that wasn’t good enough for legislative Republicans in Raleigh. They threw fairness out the window, forcing through a mid-decade map that handed Republicans an unfair 10-4 advantage in the next Congress. That’s 71% of North Carolina’s seats in the U.S. House going to Republicans and those 10 bright red districts were not even close.

    It doesn’t take a mathematician to see what’s wrong with that. And now, with Adam Gray’s apparent victory in California’s 13th District giving Republicans a bare three-seat majority in the U.S. House, it’s clear that gerrymandering in North Carolina tipped the scales in their favor and cost Democrats control of the US House of Representatives.

    Representative Wiley Nickel

    NC congressman: Republicans stole fairness from the nation in giving GOP a House majority (Raleigh News & Observer)

  • An Uncertain Future for Election Reform

    Supporters of electoral innovation – from ranked-choice voting, to independent redistricting, to proportionally representative systems – face formidable obstacles. Perhaps the most significant is simple voter comprehension.

    Carolina Forward Research Staff

    An Uncertain Future for Election Reform (Carolina Forward)

  • The Cryptocurrency Industry’s Unprecedented Election Spending

    The cryptocurrency industry spent almost $200 million to influence the outcomes of the 2024 United States elections. This unprecedented degree of corporate spending from a relatively small industry had a major effect — but probably not in the way you think.

    Let’s talk about where the money came from, where it went, what the cryptocurrency industry’s goals are in politics, and what to do now.

    Molly White