November 11, 2017

Republicans Thinking About Delaying Alabama Special Election

Trigger warning: Watching this video might make you ill.

So what is the Republican Party going to do about its Roy Moore problem?

Republican senators and their advisers, in a flurry of phone calls, emails and text messages, discussed fielding a write-in candidate, pushing Alabama’s governor to delay the Dec. 12 special election or even not seating Mr. Moore at all should he be elected….State law gives the governor broad authority to set the date of special elections….Ms. Ivey’s advisers have not ruled out exercising that power again, according to Republicans in touch with her camp, but she has signaled that she would like reassurances of support from the White House before taking such an aggressive step.

Is this serious? They’re thinking about postponing the election not because of a natural disaster or because someone died or anything like that. They’re thinking about doing it for openly partisan reasons: their candidate has turned out to be a disgusting creep who’s likely to lose, so they want a do-over. I wonder how long it will be before we get a tweet from Donald Trump declaring that this is the fair thing to do “until we get to the bottom of whether this is fake news”?

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PLEASE—BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things it doesn’t like—which is most things that are true.

We’ll say it loud and clear: At Mother Jones, no one gets to tell us what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please do your part and help us reach our $150,000 membership goal by May 31.

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