Democrats face ultimatum over ‘counting illegal votes’ in Pennsylvania Senate race
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah., took aim at Sen. Bob Casey over the Pennsylvania Democrat’s refusal to concede the election, arguing that the Senate could refuse to seat him if he continues to rely on “illegal votes.”
“If Bob Casey doesn’t concede, Pennsylvania keeps counting illegal votes, & Casey relies on those votes to claim victory, the Senate could refuse to seat him,” Lee said in a post on X Saturday while citing Article I, Sec. 5, Cl. 1, which states that each “House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns, and Qualifications of its own Members.”
The comment comes as Pennsylvania’s Senate race will be decided by a recount after Republican Sen.-elect Dave McCormick won the election by roughly 26,000 votes, or within the one percentage point margin that triggers an automatic recount under Pennsylvania law.
PENNSYLVANIA DEMOCRATS OPENLY ADMIT TO COUNTING ILLEGAL BALLOTS IN MCCORMICK-CASEY RACE
Casey has refused to concede the election despite the contest being called by multiple outlets, instead insisting that a winner be declared after all votes are counted.
But questions remain about the votes Casey is trying to count after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that ballots that lack required signatures and dates are not allowed to be included in official results, a ruling that is being ignored by Democratic officials in Philadelphia and surrounding Bucks and Montgomery counties.
“I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country,” Bucks County Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia, a Democrat, said last week. “People violate laws anytime they want. 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.”
MCCORMICK-CASEY RECOUNT COST TO TOP $1M; GOP SLAMS BLUE COUNTIES DEFYING HIGH COURT
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley has condemned Democrats in Pennsylvania, accusing the party of attempting to “steal” the election from McCormick.
“Let’s be clear about what’s happening here: Democrats in Pennsylvania are brazenly trying to break the law by attempting to count illegal ballots. They are doing this because they want to steal a senate seat,” he said on X.
Lee, meanwhile, has urged Casey to abandon the fight over the ballots voluntarily and allow McCormick to take his seat in the Senate.
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“Bob Casey, you’re better than this,” Lee said in another post on X. “It’s time to concede.”
The Casey campaign did not immediately respond to a Fox News Digital request for comment.
Nancy Pelosi is finished — no one deserves more blame for Dems’ $1B electoral collapse
It’s high time to shatter the myth of Nancy Pelosi as a master strategist. Nobody deserves more blame than the ridiculously self-titled “speaker emerita” for the Democrats’ $1 billion electoral collapse.
Under her ruthless leadership, her party lost the White House, the House, the Senate and the popular vote. You can’t say that enough.
Voters rejected the Dems from coast to coast, even in Pelosi’s deepest-blue home city of San Francisco, which saw a 7-point swing to Donald Trump.
IN ELECTION VICTORY, TRUMP’S GAINS WENT BEYOND THE BATTLEGROUNDS
She’s the only speaker in history to have lost control of the House twice.
She’s finished.
The empress emeritus has no clothes (perish the thought).
Yet she still has the nerve to reward herself with another term, filing the papers last week to run for re-election in 2026, at the tender age of 86! She’ll be 88 at the end of Trump’s term.
When is too much enough?
Her saccharine-coated “Mean Girls” style of partisan viciousness and deviousness turns out to have done nothing for her party but postpone the inevitable reckoning between the radical left and common-sense moderates. Unfortunately for the Dems, most of the latter have taken a hike under Pelosi’s reign.
Lying and infighting
If the GOP is Trump’s party, the Democratic Party is Pelosi’s — and what a viper’s nest of blame-shifting and rancor it has become, as they all blame each other for their humiliating defeat at the hands of the man they derided as a Nazi. Most Americans didn’t agree, and now the Democrats and their media handmaidens stand exposed as frauds and liars.
If Trump is such an “existential threat” to democracy, as Pelosi insisted to the bitter end, why did Joe Biden greet him with open arms and a beaming smile the other day?
“Welcome back,” said the president to the man Pelosi vowed would never again enter the White House.
“I decided a while ago that Donald Trump will never set foot in the White House again as president of the United States or in any other capacity,” she told the Guardian before the election when she was trying to justify the coup against Biden, her former longtime friend who, she kept lying, was “sharp as a tack” until he fell apart on live TV.
With her party in ruins, pent-up frustration with Pelosi’s iron grip and flawed judgment is starting to find voice. Expect it to get louder as her efforts to offload blame on Biden leave a sour taste in the mouths of party loyalists.
Since the humiliating defeat, Pelosi has been filmed publicly squabbling with Donna Brazile, has traded barbs with Bernie Sanders and has been ripped on “The View” and MSNBC. The Washington Post fact-checker even awarded her “Four Pinocchios” for lying that illegal migration was worse under Trump than Biden.
“The View” co-host Ana Navarro called Pelosi “nasty” for telling the New York Times that the Dems would have won if Biden had quit sooner.
“She wants to make sure people know it wasn’t her, [that] she has no blame in this. … It’s really unseemly.”
Symone Sanders Townsend, MSNBC host and former Biden aide, blasted Pelosi for helping “orchestrate the very public demise of the president.”
“Nancy Pelosi, everybody talks about how the speaker emerita, you know, she’s so strategic, she can count, she did all of that when she was the speaker in Congress, but my question is: Where is your calculator now?”
Anonymous Dem lawmakers vented their spleen to Axios last week.
“She needs to take a seat,” one senior Democrat said of Pelosi. “Making scattershot comments [blaming others] is not just unhelpful, it’s damaging.”
“[House Minority Leader] Hakeem [Jeffries] has been tremendously graceful and respectful of her, but I don’t think she is being respectful of him,” said another Dem, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.
‘She’s the enforcer’
Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) wasn’t afraid to go on the record to express his frustration at Pelosi’s toxic legacy.
“She embraced this ‘She’s the Godmother, she’s the enforcer’ [image] and now she’s blaming Biden,” he told Politico last week. “Well, you can’t have it both ways. You got what you wanted, and now you’re still blaming Biden.
“I think it’s really ironic that you have a woman at age 84 and she is still hanging on. Why not give a younger generation an opportunity to occupy that seat?”
Why not indeed. The only reason she’s hanging around Congress is the same reason she demanded her successor as speaker, Jeffries, bestow on her the “emerita” title: her ego.
She believes she is the only person capable of crippling Trump’s second presidency like she did his first, and she is addicted to the adulation of a lapdog press overly impressed with the fact that she is female. They even praised her classless, divisive stunt of ripping up Trump’s State of the Union speech in 2020, standing right behind him at the podium for all the world to see.
In her two decades of amoral, divisive leadership, the Democrats have become the party of censorship, scolds, war and corporate interests.
She devoted the twilight years of her career to her obsession with destroying Trump and his supporters, whom she slyly set up on Jan. 6, 2021, by refusing to give Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund the National Guard backup he begged for, and then turned the Jan. 6 committee into her personal star chamber.
Despot times
All her hatred, the impeachments and lawfare and jailing of Trump allies, served neither her party nor the country. Trump is back, better than ever, her party is in ruins and the country has been through hell for four years.
At the DNC convention that anointed Kamala Harris as their doomed presidential candidate, Dems were seen sporting buttons featuring Pelosi and the word “Godmother” with her face on a poster for the iconic Mafia movie “The Godfather.” If that’s not an admission that she still runs the party like a Mafia don, nothing is.
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It is true that she is a formidable leader in the Genghis Khan mold, as one GOP semi-admirer describes her. But what good were her dictatorial skills to the party she led off a cliff?
She needs to ride off into the sunset, for everyone’s sake.
Trump’s waste-cutter pick pulls back the curtain on strategy behind what’s getting axed
Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) incoming co-leader Vivek Ramaswamy laid out the new agency’s vision during an exclusive interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo on Sunday, telling the “Sunday Morning Futures” host the aggressive cost-cutting strategy will begin with executive action and lay the groundwork for Congress to do its part.
“The failures of the executive branch need to be addressed because the dirty little secret right now is the people we elect to run the government, they’re not the ones who actually run the government. It’s the unelected bureaucrats in the administrative state that was created through executive action. It’s going to be fixed through executive action,” he said.
“Think about the Supreme Court’s environment. Over the last several years, they’ve held that many of those regulations are unconstitutional at a large scale. Rescind those regulations, pull those regs back, and then that gives us the industrial logic to then downsize the size of that administrative state. And the beauty of all of this is that can be achieved just through executive action without Congress. Score some early wins, and then you look at those bigger portions of the federal budget that need to be addressed one by one,” he continued.
ELON MUSK, VIVEK RAMASWAMY TO LEAD TRUMP’S DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY
Ramaswamy pledged to bring “sweeping change” “as early and as quickly as possible.”
Earlier this month, President-elect Donald Trump tapped Ramaswamy and business magnate Elon Musk to lead the newfound DOGE, aimed at suggesting ways to dismantle government bureaucracy and restructure federal agencies from an outside-the-government perspective.
Since DOGE is not an official government agency, neither Musk nor Ramaswamy are considered official cabinet members nor will they be federal employees.
Their work is expected to conclude no later than July 4, 2026 – on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence’s signing.
According to Ramaswamy, the sweeping changes expected to come from the initial executive actions will lay the groundwork for Congress to “take meaningful steps” in budget reductions going forward.
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“This is about restoring self-governance and accountability in America as well. Elected leaders, if they make the wrong decisions, voters have a great choice. You can vote them out and remove them. Most of the people making these decisions from health care to the Department of Defense are failing on effectiveness because they have no accountability. Historically, it’s been the view of many scholars to say that those people could not even be fired. Now we take a different view with the environment the Supreme Court has given us in recent years, and we’re going to use that in a pretty extensive way to move quickly,” he explained.
After Trump announced his appointment, Ramaswamy withdrew himself from consideration for the Ohio Senate seat vacated by Vice President-elect JD Vance.
Ramaswamy and Musk both threw their support behind Trump during the 2024 election cycle, campaigning for the president-elect in key battleground states that largely determined the outcome of the race.
They also flanked the president-elect alongside a number of his other key allies and nominees at UFC 309 at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on Saturday night.
Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris on Nov. 5, walking away with a landslide victory after sweeping all seven swing states.
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Meet the mystery man sitting next to President-elect Trump at UFC fight
President-elect Trump returned to Madison Square Garden for the UFC fight on Saturday night in a massive way, with Elon Musk, Kid Rock, RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, House Speaker Mike Johnson and the fighting organization’s president, Dana White, in tow, while also being spotted sitting next to a major player from Saudi Arabia.
In video circulating from the event, Trump was seen conversing with the head of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), Yasir Al-Rumayyan, as Musk and others were talking and watching the fights.
Trump’s transition team did not respond to Fox News Digital’s inquiry into the matter.
The PIF is the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia, which is controlled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and governed by Al-Rumayyan. According to Reuters, the PIF was estimated to have about $925 billion in assets in July.
ELON MUSK SAYS HIS ROLE IN TRUMP’S EFFICIENCY DEPARTMENT ‘IS GOING TO BE A REVOLUTION’
Along with his involvement in the PIF, Al-Rumayyan chairs Saudi Aramco, the state-owned petroleum company, as well as the country’s largest mining company, Maaden. He is also the chairman of the English Premier’s Newcastle United Football Club.
Last year, the PGA, DP World Tour and the PIF, which backs LIV Golf, announced a deal to “unify the game of golf, on a global basis.” The announcement came nearly 15 months after LIV Golf unveiled its first series, and about a year after its first tournament.
TRUMP TEAM REPORTEDLY LOOKING TO KILL BIDEN’S $7,500 EV TAX CREDIT
The deal also signaled that a dispute between the PGA Tour, the European tour and LIV Golf would be ending.
The PIF, which has been criticized in connection to human rights, will have investment exclusivity rights for the combined golf entity, something the three groups said included “a right of first refusal on any capital that may be invested in the new entity, including into the PGA TOUR, LIV Golf and DP World Tour.” The new group will also get capital from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.
PGA TOUR AND LIV GOLF COMBINATION: THE PLAYERS, INVESTORS, MONEY
Oversight of “commercial operations, businesses and investments” at the new golf giant will fall to the board of directors whose full slate will be revealed “at a later date,” the three entities said. The release indicated that a majority of its members will be picked by the PGA Tour, which will also get a majority voting interest.
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In the new entity, PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan will serve as the CEO while Al-Rumayyan will take on the chairman position. Those two will also sit on the board’s executive committee.
‘Morning Joe’ co-hosts make admission about face-to-face meeting with Trump
MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, two of Donald Trump’s fiercest critics in the media, revealed Monday they had a face-to-face meeting last week with the president-elect, saying it was an important opportunity for those who disagree to speak with each other.
“My father often spoke with world leaders with whom he and the United States profoundly disagreed,” Brzezinski said, referring to diplomat Zbigniew Brzezinski. “That’s a task shared by reporters and commentators alike.”
It was the first time they had seen Trump in seven years, Brzezinski said, and Scarborough added that they didn’t see “eye to eye on a lot of issues, and we told him so.” Scarborough said they went over such topics as abortion, mass deportation, and threats of retribution against political opponents and media outlets.
The show added Trump was cheerful during the meeting and appeared interested in finding common ground with Democrats on major issues. Trump won a decisive victory over Vice President Kamala Harris on Nov. 5, sweeping the nation’s battleground states and also clinching the first popular vote win for a Republican in 20 years.
DID TAYLOR SWIFT’S ENDORSEMENT OF KAMALA HARRIS MOVE THE NEEDLE IN THE 2024 ELECTION?
Brzezinski took a moment to respond to the viewers who may have been appalled that they would agree to speak with Trump, whom they’ve repeatedly described as a threat to democracy.
“For those asking why we would go speak to the president-elect during such fraught times, especially between us, I guess I would ask back – why wouldn’t we?” she said. “Five years of political warfare has deeply divided Washington and the country. We have been as clear as we know how in expressing our deep concerns about President Trump’s actions and words in the coarsening of public debate.
“But for nearly 80 million Americans, election denialism, public trials, January 6, were not as important as the issues that moved them to send Donald Trump back to the White House with their vote. Joe and I realize it’s time to do something different, and that starts with not only talking about Donald Trump, but also talking with him.”
The defensive tone about speaking to Trump was noteworthy given “Morning Joe” was upset by NBC’s hiring of Trump ally Ronna McDaniel earlier this year as a paid analyst. The show and several other MSNBC luminaries publicly spoke out against McDaniel appearing on their airwaves, and her contract was terminated after less than a week.
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Brzezinski said Trump’s term would be a “consequential” presidency, but time would tell if it was “constructive.” She railed against threatening political opponents and also noted that impeachments and trials tend to turn politicians into martyrs.
“Just ask Bill Clinton and Donald Trump,” she said.
Scarborough noted that Trump can’t seek another term so this could be an opportunity for “both parties to get to work,” and claimed top Democrats had confided to him they were open to working with Trump if the feeling was mutual.
“Don’t be mistaken,” Scarborough said. “We’re not here to defend or normalize Donald Trump. We’re here to report on him and to hopefully provide you insights that are going to better equip all of us in understanding these deeply unsettling times.”
That might not sit well with some of their fellow MSNBC hosts or liberal media colleagues.
JEN PSAKI SAYS DEMOCRATS ARE LOST IN THE ‘WILDERNESS’ WITHOUT A CLEAR LEADER AFTER TRUMP’S VICTORY
Brzezinski also revealed Monday that Scarborough called Trump the day after the assassination attempt against him in July, but other than that, they had not even spoken since 2020. MSNBC kept “Morning Joe” off the air the Monday after the shooting in a controversial move at the time.
Scarborough and Brzezinski, who are married, stood out in the 2016 cycle for their bullishness on Trump’s political chances early in the Republican primary, and they took heat for frequently hosting and interviewing the future president. But they became two of his staunchest critics once he took office and Trump at times leveled intensely personal attacks on the pair.
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Scarborough, a former Florida U.S. congressman, left the Republican Party in 2017 over his disagreements with Trump.
Trump vs Taylor: New poll on favorability showdown between the two
After TIME magazine named Taylor Swift “person of the year” in 2023 amid her global Eras Tour, she solidified her position as a cultural phenomenon, specifically among young women. Then, when she endorsed the Harris-Walz campaign in 2024, it was deemed a devastating blow to the Trump campaign.
But President-elect Donald Trump’s sweeping victory over Vice President Kamala Harris indicates that Swift’s endorsement might not have had the actual impact Democrats were hoping for and that the Hollywood celebrity endorsement model might be splintering.
According to AP VoteCast, 44% of women ages 18-44 voted for Trump, while 48% of women 45 and older supported the former president, now president-elect.
‘KAMALA ERA’: DNC LAUNCHES TAYLOR SWIFT-THEMED CAMPAIGN IN PITCH TO YOUNG VOTERS
Following the presidential debate between Trump and Harris in September, Swift made her endorsement in a message to her 238 million followers on Instagram.
“I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election,” she said on Instagram. “I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them. I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos.”
“I was so heartened and impressed by her selection of running mate @timwalz, who has been standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body for decades,” Swift added.
In a New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer and Siena College poll, which was conducted starting one day after Swift endorsed the Harris-Walz campaign, nearly 2,500 likely voters nationwide revealed that 44% have a favorable opinion of Swift, compared to 34% who have unfavorable views.
The same poll found that 47% view Trump favorably, compared to 51% who don’t. The poll shows that 70% of Democrats have a favorable view of Swift, compared to 41% of independents and just 23% of Republicans. A total of 60% of Republicans indicated that they had an unfavorable view of Swift, while only 11% of Democrats felt the same way.
A September poll found that Trump has higher favorability numbers among likely voters compared to Swift.
In her endorsement, Swift also reminded first-time voters that in order to vote, they needed to register. In an Instagram story following her endorsement, Swift shared a link directing her fans and followers to Vote.gov, which is run by the General Services Administration and the Election Assistance Commission and helps visitors register to vote in their states. The site received more than 400,000 visitors in under 24 hours.
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“With love and hope, Taylor Swift Childless Cat Lady,” she signed the endorsement, referencing a comment made by Vice-President Elect JD Vance in a 2021 interview in which he said “we’re effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies.” Vance maintains the comment was a “willfully misinterpreted” and taken out of context.
Vance questioned the impact of Swift’s endorsement on Fox News.
“We admire Taylor Swift’s music, but I don’t think most Americans, whether they like her music or are fans of hers or not, are going to be influenced by a billionaire celebrity who I think is fundamentally disconnected from the interests and the problems of most Americans,” Vance said at the time.
Swift has been outspoken about her political beliefs in recent years, but had also been repeatedly criticized for not being outspoken enough, especially after Trump won in 2016.
She made her first foray into politics in 2018 when she denounced Republican Tennessee Senate candidate Marsha Blackburn and endorsed her Democratic opponent, former Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, as well as Democratic House candidate Jim Cooper. Swift’s link to a nonpartisan voter registration site gave it a major boost in traffic and new registrations.
TAYLOR SWIFT CHOOSES TO ATTEND CHIEFS GAME OVER KAMALA HARRIS RALLY ON EVE OF ELECTION
In a scene from the behind-the-scenes 2020 Netflix documentary “Miss Americana,” Swift emotionally told her parents why she planned to step into the political fray with her post against Blackburn. She also said she deeply regretted not speaking out publicly against Trump in 2016.
Swift released a pro-gay anthem, “You Need to Calm Down,” for her 2019 album “Lover.” The single’s music video featured prominent LGBT figures and derided anti-LGBT voices as backwards and ignorant, poking fun at internet trolls who dislike her progressivism. However, she still received some backlash from some left-wing sites who said she had appropriated the issue and wasn’t being a good ally to their cause.
Shortly before that single’s release, Swift started a petition at Change.org and urged fans to write letters to their senators, demanding they pass the Equality Act, a Democrat-backed bill meant to ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.
“Our country’s lack of protection for its own citizens ensures that LGBTQ people must live in fear that their lives could be turned upside down by an employer or landlord who is homophobic or transphobic. The fact that, legally, some people are completely at the mercy of the hatred and bigotry of others is disgusting and unacceptable,” she wrote in the petition.
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Other celebrities and Hollywood stars also endorsed the Democratic Party going into the 2024 presidential election, including Oprah Winfrey, Jennifer Lopez, George Clooney, Beyoncé, Bruce Springsteen, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Leonardo DiCaprio, Julia Roberts, Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo, Charli XCX, Meryl Street, Spike Lee and Barbra Streisand.