Corruption Watch: Republicans Weaponizing the Courts, Pardoning Election Deniers, and Fattening their Wallets with Taxpayer Dollars

"GOP Leader Thune just made eight of his colleagues rich. Off taxpayer money.”

How many times will the Roberts Court diminish access to the ballot? On Monday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case over whether federal ballots must be received by election officials by Election Day to be counted, reports ScotusBlog. Today, in at least 30 states, ballots just need to be postmarked by Election Day. The case, Watson v. Republican National Committee (RNC), comes from the Republican Party and other groups challenging a Mississippi law in federal court. The infamously conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the RNC by ruling that federal law requires all ballots to be received by Election Day. The Supreme Court will likely issue a decision by next July, just ahead of the midterm elections. Chief Justice John Roberts is a longtime foe of voting rights. This could go very wrong. As Tiffany Muller, president of End Citizens United, said, “Once again, Republicans are weaponizing the courts to attack the right to vote by mail, a secure, popular, and widely used process that Trump has long sought to sabotage. Make no mistake: Refusing to count ballots postmarked by Election Day would silence voters whose mail is delayed through no fault of their own, most egregiously the brave service members casting votes from overseas to ensure they are represented in the country they risk their lives to defend.”

Trump signals that he’s cool with trying to overturn elections, again. President Trump has granted pardons to Rudolph Giuliani, his former lawyer, as well as many other people accused of trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, reports MSNBC. The Trump allies he pardoned include John Eastman, a Trump 2020 campaign advisor, Mark Meadows, a former White House chief of staff, and Sidney Powell, who led a legal campaign to try to deny the election results, as well as many state-level officials who submitted fake electors to the Electoral College. As Steve Benen writes, “But in the first year of his second term, it appears Trump is no longer concerned about appearances or the pretense of propriety. He’s corrupting the process; he seems to know he’s corrupting the process; he must know that we know he’s corrupting the process; and he’s doing it anyway.”

A taxpayer-funded slush fund for Republican senators. Hidden in the spending bill to reopen the government is a provision that allows eight senators to sue the government for at least $500,000 apiece because they were not notified that their phone records were accessed during government investigations into the Jan 6th riots at the Capitol, reports AL.com. Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland introduced an amendment to prevent the provision from being included in the bill. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut posted on X, “It creates a new offense, tailored perfectly to allow Trump to write a government check of millions of dollars to 8 Republican Senators. GOP Leader Thune just made 8 of his colleagues rich. Off taxpayer money.”

The Epstein files. Thousands of the so-called Epstein files were released on Wednesday, but there are many more that could be yet to come, explains Axios. On Wednesday, the House Oversight Committee released a raft of emails that suggest that Trump “knew about the girls.” Then, Republican members of the committee released a much larger trove of files. So, Trump’s Epstein problem isn’t going away.

Billionaire brothers looking for pardons donated to Trump’s White House Ballroom, reports Forbes. Donald and Stefan Brodie are trying to outrun an old criminal conviction. Since then, they’ve donated a collective $12 million to federal races, according to Forbes, and they unsuccessfully asked President Biden to pardon them. Now, they’ve given Trump money for his ballroom. In case you missed it, yesterday Democracy News had more on the White House ballroom donors and the favors they could receive.

The vast majority of Americans say unlimited political spending weakens democracy and wealthy donors have too much power in elections, reports OpenSecrets. According to a new national poll, “nearly eight in 10 also said they either ‘strongly agree’ or ‘somewhat agree’ that large independent expenditures by wealthy donors and corporations in elections give rise to corruption, or the appearance of corruption.” The survey found that Americans across partisan divides strongly believe that unlimited political spending leads to corruption. Liana Keesing, policy lead for Issue One, the group that commissioned the poll, said, “These new findings show that people in every corner of the state – and across party lines – want a government that works for all of us, not just those with the deepest pockets.”

People are picking your pockets and making your life miserable, says Latinas En Marcha, when introducing this video that connects the dots between Florida Republican mega-donors, their no-bid contracts, and the so-called Alligator Alcatraz detention center whose conditions have been called a violation of human rights. “Even though they had no relevant experience, they still took advantage of your public money.”

Finally! On Wednesday, Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva was sworn into office to represent Arizonans in her district, a full 50 days after she was elected. Grijalva won her race decisively without taking a single cent of corporate PAC money, which she told Democracy News was “an easy decision.” On Tuesday, November 18th, Congresswoman Grijalva will participate in a virtual town hall alongside ECU President Tiffany Muller and Tennessee congressional candidate Aftyn Behn. Come through!