MAGA has a new conspiracy theory: Pennsylvania Democrats are trying to steal the Senate election because of how they’re counting provisional ballots.
The Senate race is headed to a recount after an incredibly narrow margin of difference between the top two candidates. Last week, former Republican hedge fund manager Dave McCormick was announced the winner of Pennsylvania’s Senate race with 48.9 percent of the vote, at 99 percent reporting. His opponent, incumbent Democratic Senator Bob Casey, lost with 48.5 percent.
The two sat at a difference of only 29,000 votes Wednesday, and statewide, officials have estimated that nearly 80,000 votes remained outstanding as of Thursday, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. Casey, who has not yet conceded his seat, has remained hopeful that buried in that remaining 2 percent of the states’ total ballots are enough votes to make up the difference. And Pennsylvania’s Republican secretary of state has already declared the initial results necessitate a recount.
The battle for the remaining votes has ignited long-standing issues between Republicans and Democrats in the state over what ballots are able to be counted. Democrats are pushing to count a number of contested provisional ballots that are missing signatures and privacy envelopes, and election boards across the state are also pushing to count a number of undated ballots.
Bucks County Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia cast a vote Thursday to count certain deficient provisional ballots that were missing one of two required signatures and had previously been barred by court order.
“I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country,” said Marseglia.
“People violate laws any time they want,” she continued. “So, for me, if I violate this law it’s because I want a court to pay attention. There’s nothing more important than counting votes.”
Technocrat pest Elon Musk shared a video of Marseglia on X, claiming, “They are openly trying to count illegal ballots in Pennsylvania!”
McCormick and his GOP allies went to court on Thursday to challenge the decisions of county commissioners in Philadelphia, Bucks, Montgomery, and Centre counties to include undated mail ballots in their tallies.
Republicans don’t have much hope for ex-Representative Matt Gaetz’s odds of getting into the presidential Cabinet.
The remarkably unpopular Florida politico was nominated by Donald Trump to become the country’s attorney general on Wednesday, a decision that would effectively hand the keys to the Justice Department to a man facing sex trafficking allegations. But before that happens, Gaetz has to be confirmed by the Senate—and that seems increasingly unlikely, according to members of the upper chamber.
Assuming that all Democrats will vote against Trump’s nominees, the president-elect can only afford to lose three Republican votes to squeeze his candidates into the executive branch. But Gaetz faces immense opposition from inside the party, reported The Wall Street Journal, with far more than three votes planning to oppose the MAGA bro’s nomination. Estimates predict that those against Gaetz range from 12 Republican “no” votes to upward of 30.
“It won’t even be close,” one source told the Journal.
Few conservatives were willing to point out the underlying reasons behind Gaetz’s unlikely candidacy, but they appeared to understand the 42-year-old wouldn’t hold up during the grueling confirmation process.
“It’s simply that Matt Gaetz has a very long, steep hill to get across the finish line,” North Dakota Senator Kevin Cramer told the Journal. “And it will require the spending of a lot of capital, and you just have to ask: if you could get him across the finish line, was it worth the cost?”
Another unidentified source familiar with the conversations happening among Republicans over the process told the publication that “people are pissed.”
Trump ally Senator Markwayne Mullin acknowledged that actually getting Gaetz—who up until this week was being investigated by the House Ethics Committee for alleged sexual misconduct with a minor—into the Cabinet would be “very difficult,” suggesting to the Journal that the vigorous vetting process might force Gaetz into a situation where he has to withdraw.
“Every nominee will have to acquit themselves well during the confirmation process by answering difficult questions and having their actions scrutinized,” Senator Lindsey Graham, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, told the Journal.
Meanwhile, the soon-to-be upper chamber majority appears unwilling to concede any of its power to the executive branch, pushing back on Trump’s demand that the body expedite the nomination process via recess appointments.
Elon Musk is starting to seriously annoy some in Donald Trump’s inner circle.
Musk has been hanging around Mar-a-Lago ever since his million-dollar gamble to help Trump win the presidential election paid off last week. The billionaire technocrat seems to have no intention of taking a back seat in Trump’s presidency, and it’s starting to piss off those in the president’s ranks, according to two people familiar with the Trump team’s transition who spoke with NBC News earlier this week.
“He’s behaving as if he’s a co-president and making sure everyone knows it,” one of the two people told NBC.
“And he’s sure taking lots of credit for the president’s victory. Bragging about America PAC and X to anyone who will listen. He’s trying to make President Trump feel indebted to him. And the president is indebted to no one,” they added.
The second person said that Musk had been overstepping his bounds, and that Musk has an “opinion on and about everything.”
“He wants to be seen as having say in everything (even if he doesn’t),” the source told NBC.
Musk has been pretty busy since hitching his space-age wagon to the MAGA movement. Musk met with Iran’s U.N. ambassador on Monday, reportedly hoping to broker some kind of peace negotiation on behalf........