“Understanding the full scope of Vance’s answer requires a quick recap of how Trump’s lawyers wanted January 6, 2021, to play out. The so-called Eastman memo outlined the necessary steps to prevent a transfer of power. It proposed that officials in a handful of states won narrowly by Joe Biden should submit alternative slates of electors and that then-Vice President Mike Pence should invoke his unilateral authority “without asking for permission—either from a vote of the joint session [of Congress] or from the [Supreme Court]”—to count only the Trump-supporting slates from those states.
If state legislators in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and other disputed states failed to take the bait, there was a backup plan in which Pence would cite “all the evidence and the letters from state legislators calling into question the executive certifications” as grounds for refusing to count the votes from seven disputed states.
“At the end of the count, the tally would therefore be 232 for Trump, 222 for Biden,” Eastman wrote. “Because the 12th Amendment says ‘majority of electors appointed,’ having determined that no electors from the 7 states were appointed…TRUMP WINS.”
It’s unknown whether this would have worked. Certainly, it would have drawn an immediate lawsuit from the Biden campaign, but it’s unclear how the Supreme Court would have viewed its role in such a dispute.
Crucially, Pence refused to play his part in the scheme. For doing so, he’s become a pariah in Republican politics—though he deserves to be remembered for maintaining his courage in the face of both a literal and metaphorical partisan mob.
Vance indicated in the All-In interview that he would be willing to do the opposite. Asked twice whether he would refuse to certify the election, Vance fell back both times to his claim that he would have simply asked states to submit alternative slates of electors and allowed Congress to have a debate about what to do.
That’s a cowardly response that fails to give a clear answer, but there can be no doubt about the signal Vance is sending. He is effectively saying that he’d have followed the path outlined in the Eastman memo—a path that would allow the vice president to claim he was merely letting Congress debate the outcome, and then use the chaos and uncertainty created by that same debate to throw out the results from certain states in pursuit of a different outcome.”
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“It’s also worth engaging with the underlying notion here: that the country or Congress needs to debate the results of the election. That is also nonsense.
The country did debate the 2020 election. For months. Votes were cast, results were tallied, and the Electoral College determined the winner. The final certification of the results is not the time or place for that debate to take place. Indeed, the Trump campaign took advantage of many other opportunities that are built into the system to challenge results in specific places, and none of those efforts found systemic fraud or other reasons to doubt the outcome.”
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“What Eastman proposed (and what Vance is nodding along with) is a reversal of all that: a substitution of the vice president’s and Congress’ opinion for the will of the voters. That’s not constitutional, democratic, or even populist. It’s just authoritarian.”
“The Tax Foundation estimates that a 10 percent general tariff “would raise taxes on American consumers by more than $300 billion a year,” “reduce the size of the U.S. economy by 0.7 percent,” and “eliminate 505,000 full-time equivalent jobs.” Retaliation could “further reduce U.S. GDP by 0.4 percent and eliminate another 322,000 full-time equivalent jobs.”
Trump’s proposed tariffs, including a 60 percent levy on Chinese goods, “would reduce after-tax incomes by about 3.5 percent for those in the bottom half of the income distribution,” the Peterson Institute for International Economics estimates. They “would cost a typical household in the middle of the income distribution at least $1,700 in increased taxes each year.”
Just as Trump ignores those costs, Harris wants voters to believe that raising the corporate income tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent is simply a matter of “ensur[ing] the wealthiest Americans and the largest corporations pay their fair share.” But that is true only if you overlook the broader economic impact of that change, which would hurt non-wealthy Americans as employees, consumers, and investors.
“Studies have shown that the corporate income tax is the most harmful tax for economic growth,” the Tax Foundation warns. On the flip side, recent research indicates that the Trump-backed 2017 reduction in this tax rate, which moved the U.S. from the high end among industrialized countries to the middle of the pack, “significantly boosted domestic investment.”
By raising the cost of doing business in the United States, a higher corporate tax rate inhibits investment, drives down wage and benefit growth, encourages offshoring of jobs, and reduces the return on retirement savings. “Under a 28 percent corporate rate,” the Tax Foundation estimates, “GDP would fall by $1.84” for “every $1 of higher revenue.””
“The nation’s loan program for disaster survivors has fully exhausted its funding, the Biden administration announced Tuesday. And lawmakers, the only ones who can greenlight more funding, are slated to be out until after Election Day.
Without congressional action, the Small Business Administration can’t make new loan offers to people trying to rebuild businesses and homes hit by disasters like Hurricanes Helene and Milton. Speaker Mike Johnson has repeatedly said he does not intend to call lawmakers back to town before the scheduled Nov. 12 return, however, saying over the weekend that it would be “premature” to gavel back in to approve emergency disaster aid before states have calculated their recovery needs from the two hurricanes.”
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“President Joe Biden said in a statement Tuesday that Johnson “has promised that this and other disaster programs will be replenished when Congress returns.” He urged Americans to continue to apply for the loans.
Without a refill, the agency must halt all new loan offers but can still do some prep work like initial processing of loan applications.
FEMA, on the other hand, is still expected to have enough funding to last until after Election Day, even though the agency has blown through nearly half of the $20 billion Congress approved for the disaster relief fund in late September.
FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell warned last week that she might have to pivot to covering only “immediate needs” with money in the disaster relief fund earlier than anticipated.
Criswell has predicted that she would need to switch to that cash-conservation mode in December or January, pausing all long-term disaster recovery efforts like rebuilding on Maui after last year’s wildfires. But last week the administrator warned that she’s “going to have to assess that every day to see if I can wait that long.”
The more than $20 billion Congress cleared before they left in September does not fulfill any of the emergency disaster aid requests the White House has sent over the last year. In June, the White House requested $4 billion in extra disaster funding to respond to tornadoes, wildfires and hurricanes, as well as the rebuilding of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore.
That unfulfilled request builds on the White House’s year-old plea for Congress to provide $23.5 billion in extra disaster aid.”
“Trump is likely referencing comments made by former Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam in 2019. Northam was discussing what happens if a woman delivers a nonviable fetus or a baby with life-threatening deformities. “The infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, the infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired. And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother,” Northam said. Some Republicans ran with this comment to suggest that Northam supported “post-birth abortions,” when what he was really discussing was palliative care for babies born fatal or likely fatal conditions.
Trump also kept suggesting..that the Roe v. Wade regime meant states had to allow unfettered abortion through nine months of pregnancy. But the Roe regime actually allowed states to significantly restrict abortion in later months, and the vast majority did. Then—as is still the case now—only a handful of states opted out of setting legal limits on what point in a pregnancy abortion was banned. Even in these states, the lack of a legal prohibition on later-term abortions does not necessarily mean physicians would actually perform later-term abortions, nor that women were generally seeking them without good reason, like a pregnancy that was life-threatening or a fetus that was nonviable.”
“The anti-abortion movement has been banking on more appointments of friendly federal judges and taking control of key federal agencies that could use executive power to heavily restrict reproductive freedom.”
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““Human embryos are created and discarded or frozen by dozens in most IVF procedures,” Matthew Yonke, a spokesperson for the Pro-Life Action League, told me. “It’s no way to treat human beings, and the federal government should not subsidize it.”
(Louisiana remains the only state to outright prohibit the destruction of embryos, requiring patients to either pay forever to store their unused embryos, or donate them to a married couple. Most states allow patients to decide what to do with any excess genetic material.)
Some social conservatives also lament that contemporary IVF treats parenthood like an individual right instead of a responsibility or privilege for committed couples, and others object to the ethical implications of sex selection and optimizing for certain characteristics, such as eye color or intelligence.
Ever since February, when Alabama’s Supreme Court issued its unprecedented legal decision that invoked God to claim frozen embryos count as “children” under state law, policymakers and prospective parents have been realizing how vulnerable IVF is in the United States, even as politicians scramble to assure voters it’s not actually at risk.
For religious conservatives who oppose IVF, the last seven months have provided a fresh opportunity to make their case against the assisted reproductive technology. In some states they’ve made political gains: the North Carolina Republican Party adopted a platform in June that opposes the destruction of human embryos. Also in June, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the US, approved a resolution against IVF.
Anti-abortion leaders are prepared to fight for their long-term goal of fetal personhood, just as they did for decades to overturn Roe v. Wade. In many ways, these new IVF battles are just beginning: This past spring, a supermajority of justices on Florida’s Supreme Court signaled openness to a future fetal personhood challenge, suggesting that “pre-born children” are “persons” entitled to the right to life under the Florida Constitution. Regardless of whether Trump wins in November, these fights over reproductive technology will continue to embroil conservatives and the Republican Party.”
“The signature policy proposal of Donald Trump’s third campaign for the presidency is a tariff: a tax of 60 percent imposed on all imports from China and 10 percent on imports from any other country. Not only does he want this tax hike, which would raise about $291 billion or 1 percent of GDP when fully implemented, but he says he’ll do it unilaterally. “I don’t need Congress, but they’ll approve it,” Trump declared at a September 23 rally. “I’ll have the right to impose them myself if they don’t.”
This is a rather enormous policy change for a president to undertake unilaterally, and one of dubious legality. For comparison, the hike Trump is considering is over twice as large as the tax increases used to fund Obamacare. (And make no mistake — tariffs are tax increases.) Experts like former World Trade Organization (WTO) deputy director-general Alan Wm. Wolff have argued that no law passed by Congress gives the president the power to levy across-the-board tariffs along the lines Trump proposes.
Even so, Congress has given the executive branch a remarkable amount of flexibility to set tariffs. This is a mistake. Members of Congress, whether or not they support Trump’s tariff plans, should be able to agree on this much: As the Constitution lays out in the taxing clause, it’s Congress’s job to set taxing and spending policy for the United States. It’s been that way for the US’s whole history, it’s the traditional role of legislatures in all democratic countries, and putting this power instead in the president’s hands cuts the people’s representatives out of the process of determining how they are taxed — a concept that goes back to before the American Revolution.”
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“The presidential power to impose tariffs does not originate from a simple bill or program; rather, it slowly accreted over time, with a particular expansion over the past decade as the Trump administration rediscovered authorities in old laws that enabled it to wage a trade war with China and protect the steel industry.
Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, for instance, gives the president the right to levy tariffs upon the secretary of commerce’s recommendation without asking Congress. This was the authority Trump used to slap tariffs on steel and aluminum back in 2018, tariffs which Biden recently expanded slightly.
Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 gives a similar power to impose tariffs based on unfair trade practices by foreign nations on the advice of the Office of the US Trade Representative. Trump used this power to impose sweeping tariffs against China. Biden has made liberal use of this power, too, expanding tariffs on steel, batteries, solar cells, and electric vehicles from China.
Finally, there’s Section 201 of that same 1974 law, which allows tariffs against imports that “seriously injured or threatened … serious injury” to domestic companies. Trump and Biden have used this to justify tariffs on washing machines and solar cells from most countries.
Even if Trump couldn’t implement a full 10 percent tariff on all imports with his executive powers — because the previous authorities apply only to specific industries or specific countries — he could make a lot of progress toward that goal. His 60 percent tariff on all Chinese imports, for instance, may very well be possible because it’s narrowly targeted at one nation. He and Biden have proven that the president can, without Congress, raise taxes on imports very significantly.
I happen to think most of both Trump and Biden’s tariffs were wrongheaded and that Trump’s plan for more sweeping tariffs amounts to a significant tax increase on the poor and middle class that would hurt US exports, invite retaliation from other countries, harm America’s international reputation, and fail to create any jobs for people who need them. (Vice President Kamala Harris has attacked the Trump tariff plan as a “sales tax” but hasn’t disavowed Biden’s tariff policies.)”