Arizona

Since President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris won’t come to the border, the border is coming to them. On Thursday, two buses of illegal immigrants unloaded in front of Harris’s vice presidential residence. Others have arrived in downtown New York, Chicago, and D.C., to the fury of local mayors and governors. A small planeload caused an uproar on Martha’s Vineyard when it landed on that self-proclaimed sanctuary island. More busloads are sure to come, probably in cities like Philadelphia, Boston, Minneapolis, and perhaps a beach community in Delaware. The immigrants are being transported from Republican-led border states to northern Democratic enclaves, which have long proclaimed themselves “sanctuaries” for the migrants they are now so appalled to find arriving.

Kyrsten Sinema doesn’t care. She doesn’t care about your tweets. She doesn’t care about the constant vitriol from Jacobin-lite bloggers. She doesn’t care about CNN’s Manu Raju chasing her down the halls of the Capitol to ask her about the filibuster or “voting rights” for the fifth time that day, every day. She doesn’t care about what Chuck Todd is saying about her on Sunday mornings. She doesn’t care what the astroturfed Act Blue-funded activists are saying to her while they film her in the restroom. She doesn’t care about Joe Biden or his faltering presidency.

Election audits of the 2020 election are under attack in the media. It’s easy to see why some calls for audits have drawn criticism. But audits can serve a very useful purpose. Glenn Youngkin, the Virginia Republican nominee for governor, is calling for an ‘audit’ of the state’s voting machines. The former co-CEO of the Carlyle group says: ‘I grew up in a world where you have an audit every year, in businesses you have an audit. So let’s just audit the voting machines, publish it so everybody can see it.’ Kari Lake, a former Phoenix news anchor whose candidacy for governor of Arizona has been endorsed by Donald Trump, said she would not have certified the 2020 election results in the state. She cited ‘serious irregularities and problems with the election’.

Ever wonder why President Biden doesn’t take questions very often? Or more accurately, why his staff doesn’t allow him to take questions? The easy lay-up handed to him about an altercation between an activist organization and Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema offers a perfect example. Biden was asked whether he believes it was appropriate for immigration activists to follow Sinema into a women’s restroom and film her. The President, who could have resoundingly condemned the behavior using the podium of the presidency of the United States, chose not to. In fact, he passively endorsed the activists’ conduct by saying that ‘it happens to everybody’ and that ‘the only people it doesn’t happen to are people who have Secret Service around them.

Another right-wing populist funded by Peter Thiel is trying to reach the halls of Congress by 2022. Blake Masters, the COO of Thiel’s investment firm, announced his candidacy for the US Senate in Arizona last week. Masters wants to take action against ‘Big Tech’ and corporations that ‘think they’re too big for America’. Masters's populist agenda is similar to that of another Senate candidate, Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance, who reportedly received $10 million from Thiel. In an interview with The Spectator, Masters explained how he intends to reform US manufacturing policy, prioritize onshoring, restrict legal and illegal immigration and engage in a trade war with China, if necessary.

The Supreme Court upheld two Arizona voting laws on Thursday in a case that could have major implications for election integrity across the country. The two Arizona laws at stake in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee prohibited ballot harvesting — which most commonly refers to political operatives collecting voters's ballots en masse and turning them in to polling places on their behalf — and tossed ballots that were cast in the wrong precinct. The DNC argued in its initial lawsuit that the laws violated the Voting Rights Act because they were discriminatory against minorities and did not appear to prevent voter fraud.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Tuesday in one of the most important cases for voting rights in decades. Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee centers on two Arizona measures aimed at voter integrity. The first prevents individuals from casting their ballot in the wrong precinct and the second prohibits ballot harvesting. The question at stake is whether these measures and others like them violate Section Two of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits election rules from disenfranchising minorities. The DNC's lawyers seem to argue that any election safeguard measure is discriminatory. If Biden thinks people of color don't know how to use the internet, then the DNC thinks they can't follow election laws.