The 2020 Republican primary schedule may look quite a bit different from this year's process if party leadership gets its way with rule changes at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland this summer.
Following a chaotic nominating process and looking toward the possibility of the first contested convention in decades, the GOP is beginning to consider a substantial overhaul of the way it picks presidential candidates. In one proposal, Iowa and New Hampshire would retain their early voting status, but each would be paired with a rotating selection of other states from their region — Iowa with Minnesota in 2020, for example, and then with South Dakota in 2024.
Other suggestions are more radical, like abolishing these states' unique position altogether in favor of a fully rotating calendar of primaries which gives voters in all 50 states a chance to be early deciders every few years. One thing seems certain, though: Nevada will likely lose its early position on the primary calendar thanks to alleged "irregularity" and disorder at the state's 2016 caucuses. Bonnie Kristian
If you want an oversight board done right, you have to launch it yourself, Facebook's critics have evidently decided.
Facebook is launching an independent oversight board, a so-called "Supreme Court" to which moderation decisions can be appealed, but on Friday, 25 experts and outspoken Facebook critics announced they're forming the "Real Facebook Oversight Board," their own group that will "analyze and critique Facebook's content moderation decisions, policies and other platform issues in the run-up to the presidential election and beyond," NBC News reports.
The advocacy group The Citizens is behind the Real Facebook Oversight Board, which consists of civil rights leaders and academics among other experts who reportedly plan to meet weekly over Zoom. The Citizens' founder, journalist Carole Cadwalladr, described this as an "emergency response."
"We know there are going to be a series of incidents leading up to the election and beyond in which Facebook is crucial," Cadwalladr told NBC News. "This is a real-time response from an authoritative group of experts to counter the spin Facebook is putting out."
Though Facebook's oversight board is launching in October, according to The Verge, given how long the process is expected to take, "that will be too late to hear cases related to the U.S. election." Facebook, according to NBC News, "isn't welcoming the outside board" and has expressed disappointment over its formation, and The Verge notes the board "will hold no power and is largely meant as a symbolic gesture."
An apparent pitch deck for the project reported on by Axios, though, says it plans to use "stunts, viral video, celebrity endorsement and skillful media management to throw a spotlight on the real-time threats to democracy," adding, "Democracy needs its own PR team and creative agency. We are it." Brendan Morrow
President Trump has said several times this week he may not accept an electoral loss, won't commit to a peaceful transfer of power, and expects the election to be decided by a 6-3 conservative Supreme Court.
"After more than four years of non-stop voter fraud claims" and "at least one float about delaying the November election," Politico reports, "Republicans can no longer truthfully deny that Trump may be unwilling to leave office in the event he is defeated. And Democrats must now confront the possibility they may not have the power to stop him." But Democrats are lawyering up to fight Trump's expected attempts to throw out mail-in ballots or otherwise circumvent the voters.
"I've been spending the last six weeks gaming out all the crazy things this man could do," one Democratic strategist told Politico on Thursday. "If you're prepared ... it's not as disturbing." Lots of Democrats are still disturbed. "We're a lot more organized than in 2000. A lot," said Matt Bennett at the center-left group Third Way, "but I don't know if it's enough."
The Defense Department has ruled out dragging Trump from the White House, but senior Pentagon leaders are privately discussing what to do if Trump invokes the Insurrection Act and tries "to use any civil unrest around the elections to put his thumb on the scales," The New York Times reports. "Several Pentagon officials said that such a move could prompt resignations," starting with Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
"I know that Milley is trying to think his way through, but I have my doubts he can," John Gans, former chief speechwriter to the defense secretary, told the Times. "The Pentagon plans for war with Canada and a zombie apocalypse, but they don't want to plan for a contested election."
And those congressional Republians subtweeting at Trump about an orderly transfer of power take this more seriously that you might think, Brendan Buck, a top adviser to former House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), tells the Times. "Senators are stating their principle here because it's obvious to everyone that he is, in fact, planning to dispute the results if he loses, no matter how lopsided. Calling him names isn't going to stop him, but they are trying to save themselves some trouble later by making clear they're not going to flirt with crazy conspiracies that make a mockery of our democracy." Peter Weber
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has offered a rare apology following the killing of a South Korean official.
Kim in a message to South Korea on Friday said he's "deeply sorry that an unexpected and unfortunate thing has happened in our territorial waters" after a government official from South Korea was killed at sea by North Korean troops earlier this week, The New York Times reports.
The official, South Korea said, was apparently "trying to defect to North Korea" and "was killed by troops in the North who set his body on fire for fear he might be carrying the coronavirus," the Times previously wrote. It was the "first time that North Korea has killed a South Korean citizen in its territory since 2008," the Times added, and South Korean President Moon Jae-in called the official's killing a "stunning and deeply regrettable act that cannot be tolerated."
North Korea in its message on Friday reportedly denied that troops burned the body of the official, who they called an "illegal intruder," but did say they burned his flotation device "according to our epidemiological regulations."
Institute for National Security Strategy researcher Byun Sang-Jung explained to ABC News that it's "extremely unusual for North Korea to issue a statement of regret so fast," and in fact, according to the Times, this was the first apology to the South issued in Kim's name during his time as North Korean leader. Ewha Womans University international studies professor Leif-Eric Easley told the Times this apology was a "low-cost way of managing a potential crisis situation," adding that it "may also mitigate the deepening of North Korea's pariah status in South Korean public opinion." Brendan Morrow
A federal judge in California blocked the U.S. Census Bureau late Thursday from ending the 2020 count of every U.S. resident at the end of September, siding with civil rights groups and local governments who argued that the Trump administration's premature termination of the census would result in an undercount of minorities and other hard-to-count communities. The Commerce Department had argued that ending the already shortened decennial head count on Sept. 30, not Oct. 31, was necessary to meet a Dec. 31 deadline.
U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh agreed with the plaintiffs that the inaccurate results would inequitably affect the distribution of $1.5 trillion in federal funding and skew political representation. Lawyers for the Census Bureau and Commerce Department said they will likely appeal the ruling. Peter Weber
Trump signs toothless 'historic' order on pre-existing conditions, promises drug coupons for seniors
"President Trump capped his fruitless four-year journey to abolish and replace the Affordable Care Act by signing an executive order Thursday that aims to enshrine the law's most popular feature," protections for people with pre-existing conditions, while "avoiding the thorny details of how to ensure such protections without either leaving the ACA, or ObamaCare, in place or crafting new comprehensive legislation," The Washington Post reports.
Stat News describes Trump's affirmation of pre-existing conditions protections as "likely empty rhetoric" and one of several "simple, superficial, and non-binding executive orders" that will neither "improve the quality of Americans' health care or lower its cost."
Trump was more bullish in what was billed as a health-care policy speech in North Carolina. "The historic action I'm taking today includes the first-ever executive order to affirm it is the official policy of the United States government to protect patients with pre-existing conditions," he said. His administration is backing a lawsuit before the Supreme Court that could strike down those protections, already enshrined in the sweeping law Democrats passed a decade ago, but Trump said he's "putting it down in a stamp, because our opponents, the Democrats, like to constantly talk about it."
Thursday's actions were "a tacit admission that Trump had failed to keep his 2016 promise to replace his predecessor's signature achievement with a conservative alternative," the Post reports. But that failure "has not stopped Trump from repeatedly promising a soon-to-come health-care plan in a repetitive cycle of boastful pledges and missed deadlines that intensified in recent weeks ahead of the November election."
Trump also "promised millions of older Americans would receive $200 toward the cost of prescription drugs and signed executive orders he said would somehow prevent unexpected medical bills," the Post reports. The $200 coupons, which Trump said will arrive for 33 million Medicare beneficiaries "in the coming weeks," are pretty clearly "a political ploy to curry favor with seniors who view drug prices as a priority," Stat News says. And it's not clear how or if the White House can legally pay the $6.6 billion price tag, though the administration pointed to savings from a regulation that hasn't yet been implemented.
You can read more about the $200 gift cards, Trump's other largely symbolic moves on health care, and the conference call in which Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Medicare administrator Seema Verma struggled to portray them as "historic" at Stat News. Peter Weber