[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] A Maine Republican has filed notice of his intent to impeach their secretary of state, accusing her of overstepping her authority by removing Donald Trump from the state ballot and arguing that, by her rationale, Joe Biden should also be removed.
John Andrews, was elected in 2018 to the Maine House of Representatives, said on Friday he filed a request with the Maine Revisor's Office, saying he wanted 'to file a Joint Order, or whichever is the proper parliamentary mechanism under Mason's Rules, to impeach Secretary of State Shenna Bellows.'
Bellows on Thursday announced that Trump was disqualified from their state primaries for violating Section Three of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits anyone who has engaged in insurrection from holding office.
Her ruling made Maine the second state to strike Trump from the ballot, after Colorado's Supreme Court on December 19 came to the same conclusion. Colorado's ruling was temporarily reversed on Thursday when the Republican party filed an appeal, and the decision in both Maine and Colorado is expected to go to the U.S. Supreme Court - something which Bellows said she welcomes.
Andrews said he wants to impeach Bellows 'on the grounds that she is barring an American citizen and 45th President of the United States, who is convicted of no crime or impeachment, their right to appear on a Maine Republican Party ballot in March.'
Bellows argued that, under Maine law, Trump did not have to be convicted to be disqualified - merely to have engaged in insurrection. She has been receiving death threats as a consequence of her decision.
Trump's campaign has denounced the decision and called Bellows a 'virulent leftist and a hyper-partisan Biden-supporting Democrat.'
Steven Cheung, Trump's spokesman, said: 'We are witnessing, in real-time, the attempted theft of an election and the disenfranchisement of the American voter.
'Make no mistake, these partisan election interference efforts are a hostile assault on American democracy.'
Andrews on Friday morning told Fox News that he felt, under her rationale, Joe Biden could also be removed from the vote.
'Under Shenna Bellows' new standard you could argue that President Biden be barred due to section three - the giving of aid or comfort to the enemies thereof,' he said.
'I would argue that releasing billions to Iran and selling our strategic oil reserves to Chinese interests could qualify as that, if no convictions are required under Shenna Bellows' new rules.
'And that is why this is such a dangerous game that she has created.'
Andrews said that Bellows, a Democrat who tweeted in 2021 that she believed Trump had engaged in insurrection, was a partisan who was not qualified to make the decision.
Unlike in Michigan and Colorado, where decisions on Trump’s ballot eligibility were recently made by those states’ Supreme Courts, Maine’s was made by Bellows alone — putting her, and perhaps her experience as a Holocaust educator, in the political spotlight for 2024.
A Democrat who served two terms in the Maine Senate, Bellows was the Maine Holocaust center’s director from 2018-2020, concurrently with her second term in the legislature. She left the position after the state legislature appointed her as Maine’s first female secretary of state. (Unlike in other states where the position is elected by voters, Maine’s is appointed by lawmakers.)
Her Trump decision made Maine the second state, after Colorado, to rule the former president ineligible for its primary ballot based on the Insurrection Clause. The move sets the stage for a highly consequential legal battle that will likely soon play out before the nation’s highest court. Trump’s team has appealed the Colorado decision to the Supreme Court, and Bellows said she recognized its decision could soon nullify her own.
Michigan’s Supreme Court has also separately ruled that Trump can stay on their state’s primary ballot, but that the door was still open for his removal from its general election ballot.
Previously, Bellows had been the head of the state’s chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and founded a consulting firm for nonprofits. She ran as the Democratic nominee for US Senate in 2014 against popular Republican Susan Collins and won only 31 percent of the statewide vote.
Founded in 1985 by Holocaust survivor Gerda Haas, the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine is located on the University of Maine’s campus in the state capital of Augusta. Bellows left the helm in 2020. The center focuses on education, offering courses to the state’s schools and programming guest speakers.
*shrug* For two years. The job of the head is primarily administrative and raising funds, and possibly not more than a figurehead if the position is a political sinecure. The head or the administrative assistant book the speakers — who until recently were Holocaust survivors like my mother — but have no say in what the speakers actually say. My mother was a popular speaker for the Holocaust societies of Buffalo, NY and Cincinnati, so I heard some stories from her two decades in the trenches.
[ET via ZERO] Facing a monumental challenge to get on the ballot in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues to criticize legal efforts to prevent former President Donald Trump from appearing on the ballot in multiple states.
The Colorado Supreme Court on Dec. 19 declared President Trump ineligible in the state based on a provision in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment that prevents individuals who have engaged in "insurrection" against the United States from holding office.
Mr. Kennedy, who announced on Oct. 9 that he would run for president in 2024 as an independent instead of as a Democrat because the Democrat National Committee was "rigging the primary," has expressed his disapproval of the decision several times since.
He wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter:
"Colorado Supreme Court ruling makes America look like a Banana Republic. Why doesn’t every American understand that if they can do this to a former US President, EVERYONE is vulnerable to punishment for crimes with which they have never been convicted. Democracy would be a total shambles."
[Google] Barack Obama's tenure as the 44th president of the United States began with his first inauguration on January 20, 2009, and ended on January 20, 2017. A Democrat from Illinois, Obama took office following a decisive victory over Republican nominee John McCain in the 2008 presidential election.
[FoxNews] Over 20,000 migrants have appeared in the Windy City since August 2022.
Golly.
Chicago's mayor has decided to use the city's budget surplus of $95 million to accommodate the mounting costs of the thousands of illegal migrants pouring into the city.
According to the Chicago Sun Times, citing Mayor Brandon Johnson's top aid, the move came to share with residents how the city is providing care and shelter for the over 15,000 migrants flooding the city.
Johnson’s senior adviser, Jason Lee, said that while the resources will help, it will not "change the outlook" for the windy city's continued "unstable" migrant crisis.
"This doesn’t change that outlook," Lee told the Sun-Times. "We’re going to continue to lobby the federal government for more support as the situation becomes, frankly, more unstable."
In November, Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced that Illinois will funnel an additional $160 million to help migrants arriving in Chicago to resettle, including $65 million to help the city launch "winterized" temporary shelter to avoid people sleeping outdoors in cold weather.
Johnson has criticized President Joe Biden’s administration for not directing more federal money to help deal with a situation that has continued to escalate-with no end in sight.
"What I have worked to do instead of having chaos is provided some structure and calm around the situation and, without significant federal support, this is not sustainable," Johnson said on CNN.
#4
I think use of Fauci Flu funds is more widespread than some might think and hardly used for Fauci Flu-related issues. I don't think it was a coincidence that Biden kept extending the "emergency" so political shit holes such as California, Nueva York, and Illinois could continue to receive federal money.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[ET via ZERO] Facing a monumental challenge to get on the ballot in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues to criticize legal efforts to prevent former President Donald Trump from appearing on the ballot in multiple states.
