Live 2020 Election Updates: Mike Pence Criticizes John Roberts
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Pence’s harsh words for Roberts could be a preview of the Supreme Court as a 2020 issue.
Vice President Mike Pence assailed Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. on Wednesday as a “disappointment to conservatives,” criticizing him for siding with liberals in several major decisions during his Supreme Court tenure and arguing that re-electing Mr. Trump was key to ensuring a strong conservative majority on the court.
With Mr. Trump trailing in the polls amid his administration’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic and its dire economic consequences, his team appears especially likely to place the courts, an area of unambiguous conservative triumph, at the center of his case for re-election.
In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, Mr. Pence said the record of the Roberts court served as “a reminder of just how important this election is for the future of the Supreme Court,” citing the chief justice’s decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act in 2012, as well as more recent rulings this year on abortion and church services in which he was also the swing vote.
The abortion case specifically, in which Chief Justice Roberts joined the court’s four more-liberal members to strike down a Louisiana law that could have left the state with just one abortion clinic, had been “a wake-up call for pro-life voters around the country who understand, in a very real sense, the destiny of the Supreme Court is on the ballot in 2020,” Mr. Pence said.
If this pitch rings familiar to conservative voters, that is precisely the point. Four years ago, a Supreme Court vacancy — made possible when Senate Republicans refused to consider President Barack Obama’s nominee, Judge Merrick B. Garland, to replace Justice Antonin Scalia — helped lift Mr. Trump to victory, according to exit polls and top Trump allies.
“It’s an issue that looms every bit as large in 2020 as it did in 2016,” Carrie Severino, president of the conservative Judicial Crisis Network, said in an interview on Thursday.
In June, Mr. Trump celebrated the confirmation of his 200th lifetime appointment to the federal bench. “He’s already made a huge impact,” Ms. Severino said. “And that life tenure works in your favor once you get these great people on the bench.”
Mr. Trump released a list of potential Supreme Court nominees in 2016 when he was campaigning for president and has pledged to produce another such list before the election.
“He did that in 2016. He kept his word. He’s going to do that in the fall of 2020,” Mr. Pence said. “And in the next four years, he’ll keep his word and appoint more principled conservatives to our courts.”
Tennessee voters are deciding on Thursday whether to give Bill Hagerty, a candidate endorsed by President Trump, the Republican nomination for a Senate seat. Mr. Hagerty, who served as the president’s first ambassador to Japan, has coasted through the primary to succeed the retiring Senator Lamar Alexander, in large part on Mr. Trump’s stamp of approval.
Despite styling himself as an outsider of sorts, Mr. Hagerty has also received the backing of a veritable who’s who of Tennessee Republican politics, including Senator Marsha Blackburn and former Gov. Bill Haslam, as well as kind words from Mr. Alexander himself. But the dissonance between Mr. Hagerty’s Trump-centered campaign and his more establishment-friendly background — stints in private equity, a longtime friendship with Senator Mitt Romney of Utah — has made the race take a competitive turn in recent weeks.
Manny Sethi, an orthopedic surgeon at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, has used his insurgent campaign to put Mr. Hagerty’s ties to Mr. Romney, for one, front and center, and has tried to fashion himself as the race’s most authentic conservative and ally of Mr. Trump’s agenda. He’s managed to collect his own cast of prominent Republican supporters, including Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky.
The two candidates’ final push to out-Trump one another has made the primary one of the nastiest in the country, with seemingly each morning bringing a new slew of attack ads, many of them misleading. The result has been a race in which voters have learned a great deal about Mr. Hagerty and Mr. Sethi’s allegiance to the president, but perhaps not so much about the candidates themselves.
“I’m not sure people have learned much about either candidate in the course of the race that’s going to be relevant to their service as senator,” said Tom Ingram, a former chief of staff to Mr. Alexander.
After months of increasingly vocal protestations that social media companies are letting Mr. Trump play by a different set of rules, two warning shots were fired this week.
First, Facebook announced on Wednesday that it was removing a post from the president’s page featuring a clip of an interview he had given earlier in the day to Fox News, in which he falsely said that children were “almost immune” to the coronavirus. It was the first time that Facebook had taken such a move against Mr. Trump, despite repeated entreaties.
Several hours later, Twitter announced that it had frozen the president’s campaign account, @TeamTrump, for a post linking to the video. The campaign was, a spokesman said, in “violation of the Twitter Rules on Covid-19 misinformation.” At issue was the statement made by Mr. Trump denying established scientific facts about the virus.
The post was removed a short time later and the account was unlocked.
But both measures represented a turning point in the relationship that major social media companies have with Mr. Trump, who has used their platforms to advance his political aims and to harness energy from supporters, but who has never felt compelled to adhere to their rules.
Mr. Trump’s conservative allies have repeatedly complained that such rules are arbitrarily enforced. But in the pandemic era, in which misinformation about the virus has been hard to stamp out, tech companies have gotten somewhat more serious about enforcement.
To be sure, freezing the campaign Twitter account is nowhere near the wound to Mr. Trump that taking action against his personal feed would be. But after months of stasis, social media firms appear to be showing the president, the White House and his political aides that their pliability goes only so far.
Snap, the company that owns Snapchat, will make a major effort to register first-time voters.
Snap, the company behind the popular social media app Snapchat, is planning a major push to register first-time voters within its app and guide them through the ballot process ahead of the election on Nov. 3.
Beginning in early September, the social media app, which is popular with young smartphone users, will introduce a new tool in partnership with TurboVote that allows users to register from within their Snap account with a streamlined set of prompts. The process is intended to eliminate the more complex process of having to go to the website of TurboVote and other registration sites.
The company will also promote a voter guide for users searching for terms associated with voting and the election. The guide will contain content from partners like the N.A.A.C.P., the American Civil Liberties Union and the Latino Community Foundation. Also starting in September, the N.A.A.C.P. and other partners will begin to flood Snap with short videos, postcards and pithy guides to information around policies promoted by candidates.
In 2018, Snap conducted a similar voter campaign and helped direct more than 400,000 young voters to register for the first time. An estimated 15 million Americans have turned 18 since the last presidential election.
“That voting bloc has as much to gain and much to lose if the election doesn’t turn out to their advantage,” said Jamal Watkins, a vice president of civic engagement for the N.A.A.C.P.
Top Democrats and White House officials remained nowhere close to an agreement for a new rescue package to address the coronavirus’s toll on the economy, growing increasingly pessimistic that they could meet a self-imposed Friday deadline as Mr. Trump again threatened to act on his own to provide relief.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday suggested that he should do so on at least one issue, reinstating an expired federal moratorium on evictions.
“He can extend the moratorium, and I hope that he does” Ms. Pelosi said in an interview with CNBC. But she took aim at Republicans who she said were refusing to agree to critical aid, saying, “perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.”
Even as they vowed to continue talks, negotiators remained dug in on crucial points of any potential deal, jeopardizing additional relief for small businesses and laid-off workers — and all but guaranteeing that senators who had planned to go home for a scheduled recess next week would instead stay in Washington awaiting a deal.
Given the number of outstanding policy issues, including the revival of expanded unemployment benefits and Mr. Trump’s rejection of a key Democratic demand for nearly $1 trillion for struggling state and local governments, the prospect of votes on such a package next week appeared remote.
Mr. Biden had out-raised Mr. Trump in the two previous months, the first time that the presumptive Democratic nominee had out-raised the Republican incumbent. Mr. Biden had raised $141 million in his shared accounts with the Democratic National Committee in June, compared to $131 million for Mr. Trump with the R.N.C.
The sums for both parties are far higher than four years ago, when Hillary Clinton raised $89 million with the party in July and Mr. Trump collected $80 million.
Both campaigns announced their dueling July figures on Wednesday evening, with Mr. Biden’s campaign going first and Mr. Trump’s soon following.
“Silent Majority Donors,” Gary Coby, Mr. Trump’s digital director, wrote on Twitter, surrounding the phrase with four American flag emojis.
The Biden campaign cheered how much of its haul it had saved for the fall.
“The Biden campaign is on the march, building off the incredible momentum from this summer with another lights-out fund-raising month, banking another $50 million for the final stretch to Election Day,” Mr. Biden’s campaign manager, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, said in a statement.
She said the campaign and party entered August with $294 million in the bank. Mr. Trump’s campaign said it and the party had more than $300 million cash on hand.
“The enthusiasm behind President Trump’s re-election continues to grow as July’s massive fund-raising totals prove,” said Bill Stepien, Mr. Trump’s campaign manager. The Trump campaign said that July was its biggest online fund-raising month ever, as donations poured in even as Mr. Trump trails Mr. Biden in national and key battleground polls.
When Bernie Sanders lost to Mr. Biden, the left mourned what could have been, worried that it had faltered at a once-in-a-generation crossroads for the Democratic Party.
This week, the progressive activist Cori Bush defeated Representative William Lacy Clay Jr. of Missouri, a 10-term incumbent and member of a political dynasty that had represented the St. Louis area for more than 50 years. Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan also cruised in her primary against the more moderate Detroit City Council president, proving the staying power of the group of progressive congresswomen known as the “Squad.”
Earlier primary contests led to other victories for the left: Jamaal Bowman, a former middle school principal, ousted the longtime incumbent Representative Eliot L. Engel in the Bronx and Westchester, the progressive lawyer Mondaire Jones won a House primary for an open seat in New York’s Rockland County, and Marie Newman defeated an anti-abortion Democrat in Illinois. And so what began for the party’s left wing as a year of “what could’ve been” is turning into a promise of “what can be,” as the successes provide a new road map of political possibilities.
“People are ready to elect people who they see actually doing the work,” Ms. Bush said in an interview.
Mr. Sanders hosted Ms. Tlaib, Ms. Bush, and Mr. Bowman in a livestreamed conversation Wednesday night, an event that drew nearly 100,000 viewers.
Mr. Sanders said the trio would “take the progressive banner” and bring it into “conflict with the establishment politicians and the corporate elite” who hold the reins of power in Congress.
As they recounted their resounding victories, the trio heaped praise on Mr. Sanders for continuing to provide leadership for them and progressives even after he lost his presidential bid.
“You didn’t become the Democratic nominee, but you didn’t give up on this movement,” Ms. Tlaib told Mr. Sanders.
Biden’s Milwaukee moment is canceled, and so is a normal presidential campaign.
The decision to cancel major in-person appearances at the Democratic National Convention, at the recommendation of health officials, was the final blow to the prospect that the fall campaign would even remotely resemble a traditional presidential contest, as the country confronts more than 150,000 deaths from the virus and cases continue to rise in parts of the country.
“The conventions as we traditionally have known them are no more,” said Terry McAuliffe, the former Democratic National Committee chairman who oversaw the party’s 2000 and 2004 conventions. “They will be more interactive and more digital, with more on social media.”
Other than the party chairman, Tom Perez, a small handful of Democratic officials will travel to Milwaukee from out of state to attend the convention. Some Wisconsin officials may deliver speeches from the crowd-free soundstage at the city’s convention center, where Mr. Biden was to deliver his nomination acceptance speech. He will now do that from his home state, Delaware.
Mr. Trump and Republicans, who have careened from moving most of their convention from Charlotte, N.C., to Jacksonville, Fla., to canceling the made-for-TV portion of their event, have been slower to give up on the prospect of an in-person convention despite the serious health risks, and 336 delegates are still set to gather in North Carolina.
Reporting was contributed by Luke Broadwater, Reid J. Epstein, Matt Flegenheimer, Sheera Frenkel, Katie Glueck, Shane Goldmacher, Maggie Haberman, Astead W. Herndon, Cecilia Kang, Elaina Plott and Matt Stevens.