Super PACs Are a Waste of Cash
Plus: Clarence Thomas’s Flimsy Defense
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TIM MILLER: The Super PACs Are Worthless. Donors Should Stop Torching Their Cash.
SUPER PACS FOR SEVERAL GOP CANDIDATES challenging Donald Trump have raised hundreds of millions of dollars to help fund efforts to displace him as the party’s nominee—and they have absolutely nothing to show for it.
No progress. No signs of life. No movement. Nada.
The impotence of the super PAC efforts is an all-the-more-inviting target for ridicule when you consider that this entire strategic approach was discredited in the 2016 and 2020 presidential races. (I can speak from firsthand Jeb! experience about the law of diminishing returns on super PAC dollars.)
In both cycles, the major parties nominated standard bearers with middling to poor fundraising and near-nonexistent organizational capabilities thanks to their brand positioning with voters and earned media momentum (Clyburn!).
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DENNIS AFTERGUT: Clarence Thomas’s Flimsy Defense.
LAST WEEK, SUPREME COURT JUSTICE Clarence Thomas, following a ninety-day extension, filed a yachtload of corrections in his financial reporting forms for 2022 and previous years.
The accompanying six-page statement from his lawyer, Elliot S. Berke, deserves scrutiny because of the strategy it adopts: that the best defense to an embarrassing story is a good offense.
Berke goes full Trump. He attempts to convert Thomas, who made the errors, into a victim of his critics’ “hatred for his [conservative] judicial philosophy.”
KIMBERLY WEHLE: Trump Disqualification: How Feasible (or Radical) Is It?
A DEBATE HAS EMERGED as to whether the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution bans Donald Trump from running for president given his role in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election and the January 6, 2021 mob attack on the U.S. Capitol. Section 3 of the amendment specifically states that “No person shall . . . hold any office, civil or military, under the United States . . . who, having previously taken an oath . . . as an officer of the United States . . . to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof” (emphasis added). Anyone with a basic command of English can read this language and conclude that Trump’s deliberate, multi-tiered efforts to use the powers of the presidency to wrest the 2020 election from the lawful winner—a ruse that culminated in bloodshed, gallows erected to hang the vice president, multiple deaths, and prison sentences for participants—qualifies.
🚨 OVERTIME 🚨
Happy Wednesday! The GOP ad war has hit the $100 million mark. Will any of it matter?
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