How one DHS agency is swatting down voter-fraud claims in real time

Since Election Day, President Donald Trump and his allies have pushed numerous merit-free allegations of voting irregularities.

The Department of Homeland Security’s top cyber official is swatting them down in near real-time — contradicting the president in a way that often ends in a pink slip.

From his perch atop the DHS Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Chris Krebs has been using his agency’s “Rumor Control” website — and his personal Twitter feed — to take on the viral conspiracies that are circulating widely in conservative circles, some of which have been promoted by the president and his top allies. Launched prior to the election to help voters navigate domestic and foreign misinformation, the website has now essentially morphed into a post-election fact-checking operation for the outgoing president and his supporters.

Reports of dead people voting? The website notes the “reality” is that “election integrity measures protect” against this — an implicit rebuke of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani's recent statements.

Reports that thousands of “Biden-only ballots” show rampant fraud? The website notes these ballots show up in every election “and do not by themselves indicate fraud” — indirectly contradicting Trump campaign legal adviser Sidney Powell.

And over on Krebs’ Twitter feed, the dismissals are more blunt, sheared of the website’s bureaucratic language.

“This is not a real thing,” Krebs tweeted in response to a conspiracy theory floated by Trump’s allies — including a prominent Fox News host — about a computer called “Hammer” and corresponding program called “Scorecard” that some conservatives say secretly siphoned votes from Trump to President-elect Joe Biden.

“Same as yesterday, Hammer and Scorecard is still a hoax,” he reiterated a day later. “That’s it. That’s the tweet.”

The reality check is the end result of a decision by Krebs, who took over as CISA director in June 2018, to aggressively expand CISA’s partnership with state and local election officials in preparation for the 2018 and 2020 elections, and to make combating disinformation a top priority for the agency. Over two years later, Krebs is one of the few remaining Trump political appointees who has often publicly contradicted the president — while not naming him directly — and managed to keep his job.

“He volunteered to jump on a grenade that no one wanted to jump on,” said former Facebook chief information security officer Alex Stamos, referring to Krebs’ early commitment to making the fight against disinformation a key CISA mandate.

Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, agreed, arguing that “CISA’s effort to clearly and consistently communicate about vulnerabilities, including disinformation, in this entire election cycle has been critically important.”

Brookie added: “CISA has been that credible and non-partisan voice because of its mandate to protect elections for what they are: critical infrastructure in a democracy.”

Stamos, who has worked with Krebs on cybersecurity issues, said his apolitical posture is a big part of what allowed Krebs to remain fairly uncontroversial during his tenure. The CISA chief “made himself a service provider” to state and local election officials, Stamos said, who, though long wary of federal overreach, broadly began to trust him — particularly given CISA’s work outside of the election security space, on issues such as foreign adversaries’ targeting of U.S. critical infrastructure.

“The riskiest part for him is now,” Stamos said, referring to Krebs’ ability to stay under Trump’s radar until Biden is inaugurated. “He’s not gone out and said anything partisan, but he has swatted down disinformation related to the cybersecurity of election infrastructure — which is absolutely the responsible thing to do, but also risky” from a political perspective.

Trump’s election defeat has not stopped him from shaking up his national security apparatus — the president fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Monday and is considering firing CIA Director Gina Haspel and FBI Director Chris Wray. Krebs has so far managed to stay under Trump’s radar, but some worry that might not last.

“There’s no way Director Krebs leaves his role in this Administration unless he is forcibly removed,” said a disinformation expert who works closely with DHS and asked to remain anonymous, “which would also remove one of the last safeguards for election security and be an outright attack on democracy itself.”

Krebs was among the first to pour cold water on #Sharpiegate, a quickly debunked conspiracy theory pushed by the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee. The theory posited that ballots in Arizona filled out using a Sharpie pen had been invalidated because they could not be read.

“Don’t promote disinfo! Stop spreading #SharpieGate claims,” Krebs wrote last week.

And Rumor Control was out front early warning voters that results might be delayed because of the need to count all valid mail-in ballots.

“Rumor: If results as reported on election night change over the ensuing days or weeks, the process is hacked or compromised, so I can’t trust the results,” the site reads, echoing false claims made by Trump that his leads “miraculously disappeared” as days went by.

“Reality: Election results reporting may occur more slowly than prior years,” the site clarifies. “This does not indicate there is any problem with the counting process or results. Official results are not certified until all validly cast ballots have been counted, including ballots that are counted after election night.”

After nearly four years at DHS, Krebs is eyeing his next move, according to people familiar with his thinking. Some believe it’s unlikely that he will stay in government through the next administration, but noted that, if he is not fired by Trump, he will probably stay long enough to help the Biden transition team and see the new administration into its first few months.

Krebs’ latest warning on Tuesday included an exasperated, crazed-looking emoji to emphasize the bizarre nature of the theories CISA was having to swat down.

“Don't forget,” he wrote. “(1)Hammer/Scorecard is still nonsense, &(2) DHS IS NOT carrying out a fraud sting op using watermarked ballots.”

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5 key moments from the latest SCOTUS Obamacare showdown

Obamacare returned to the Supreme Court on Tuesday as backers and opponents of the law did battle over the latest legal campaign to bring down President Barack Obama’s signature health care overhaul.

After two hours of arguments, the law’s supporters appeared to have the upper hand, after at least two of the court’s conservative justices seemed poised to excise the now-toothless-but-allegedly unconstitutional individual mandate rather than blow up the entire Affordable Care Act.

Still, considerable uncertainty remained over how the justices would sort through the thicket of highly technical legal issues of standing and statutory interpretation that seemed to have the potential to splinter the court.

Here’s POLITICO’s look at five key moments from one of the highest-profile cases the Supreme Court is expected to take up this term.

Grief from the chief

Perhaps the most startling remarks at Tuesday’s arguments came from Chief Justice John Roberts, who seemed to be complaining that he was bamboozled by Obamacare advocates back in 2012 when they argued that the mandate that individuals buy health insurance was critical to the functioning of the law. Roberts drew the ire of conservatives in that closely watched, politically sensitive case by aligning with the court’s liberal wing, which then stood at four justices, to preserve the provision.

“Eight years ago, those defending the mandate emphasized that it was the key to the whole act,” Roberts recalled. “Everything turned on getting money from people forced to buy insurance to cover all the other shortfalls in the expansion of healthcare.”

“But now the representation is that, oh, no, everything’s fine without it. Why the bait and switch?” the chief said, apparently saving up the pointed query for lawyer Donald Verrilli, who argued on Tuesday for states friendly to the law but also served as the law’s key defender at the court as solicitor general eight years ago. “We spent all that time talking about broccoli for nothing?”

Roberts’ reference to broccoli invoked a popular metaphor in the 2012 legal debate: whether the theory behind the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate meant the government could also force Americans to buy broccoli to make themselves healthier. (Roberts ultimately ruled that the feds couldn’t force purchases of broccoli or health insurance, but could slap a tax on those who refuse to buy it.)

It wasn’t totally clear on Tuesday whether Roberts was expressing genuine regret about being misled eight years ago or whether any such sentiment would affect his view on the latest Obamacare case.

Beyond broccoli: SCOTUS’ analogy palooza

The justices proved unsatisfied on Tuesday with the broccoli analogy that cast a green pall over the earlier Obamacare fight. As they made their points, several members of the court felt compelled to offer their own examples of hypothetical or real government mandates akin to the now-impotent one in the Affordable Care Act.

Roberts kicked off the analogy palooza by positing Congress passing a statute that says that “everybody has to mow their lawn once a week.”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh also entered the derby. “Suppose Congress passed a law requiring every American who lives in a house to fly an American flag in front of the house,” he urged. “It’s a forced acquisition of an unwanted good or service.”

But Justice Stephen Breyer, the court’s unrivaled king of hypotheticals, brought it home with a trifecta. “Buy war bond. … Plant a tree. … Clean up the yard,” Breyer said, suggesting that Obamacare’s mandate stripped of its accompanying penalty was more of an exhortation than an order to do anything.

The Barrett bust

Anyone who watched the high-stakes confirmation hearings of Amy Coney Barrett last month would’ve come away with the impression that President Donald Trump tapped Barrett for the seat with one preeminent goal in mind: unleashing her like a torpedo aimed at blowing Obamacare out of the water at the arguments this week.

Democrat after Democrat painted her as an ideological zealot intent on destroying the landmark health care law, regardless of the misery and suffering such a ruling might create. Huge posters of those who’ve benefited from the law’s provisions were trundled into the hearing room and loomed over the session.

At those hearings, Barrett did her best to parry the criticism by pointing out that there’s a presumption that statutes should be preserved even if a part of them is thrown out — the severability issue at the heart of the current challenge.

But for all the hours spent on the issue last month, Barrett didn’t seem to be much of a factor on Tuesday. Of course, she’ll get a vote like every other justice. But her status as the court’s most junior member, combined with the more regimented sessions prompted by the virtual arguments, made her something of an afterthought, coming up at the bottom of the batting order in each round of questioning.

Barrett did interrupt a lawyer defending the law, California Solicitor General Michael Mongan, suggesting he’d strayed from a question she had asked that was aimed at how the government keeps track of who’s bought insurance. The court’s newest justice did ask an interesting question about whether the federal agencies sued in the case are actually causing the plaintiffs any harm, but it seems doubtful the entire challenge can be resolved on those grounds.

Barrett also seemed to flex her textualist muscles by take a subtle dig at Breyer late in Tuesday’s arguments, after he suggested that when the law says Americans who aren’t exempt “shall” buy health insurance, it really means they are encouraged to do so.

“Let’s assume that I agree with you and that I think ‘shall’ is ‘shall’ and not ‘should’ and, so, it’s a command,” Barrett said to acting Solicitor General Jeff Wall, who argued for the Trump administration against the law.

In the end, it seemed as though Barrett’s role in the case would be not the outsize one predicted at her hearings, but a more modest one. The reason is simple: Two of her GOP-appointed colleagues — Roberts and Kavanaugh — sounded unlikely to strike down the statute. That would make Barrett’s vote interesting to see but not pivotal to the outcome.

Who will stand up for standing?

One key question in the case is whether the red states suing to overturn Obamacare or a couple of individual plaintiffs seeking to do the same actually have legal standing to go into court and challenge the law. To do that, they have to show some injury they’re incurring or threatened with — not the easiest thing to do with a mandate that everyone from Trump on down has said is effectively repealed and won’t be enforced.

At least two justices suggested that in the Trump administration’s haste to upend the law, it’s overlooking the dangers for the federal government in allowing any state or virtually any person to come into court and challenge an entire law based on an objection to a single provision that isn’t even being enforced.

“I think that really expands standing dramatically,” Roberts said, in a riff that sounded more like a statement than a question. “I mean, just in this act alone, you’re talking about almost a thousand pages and you’re letting somebody not injured by the provision that needs challenging sort of roam around through those thousand pages and pick out whichever ones he wants to attack.”

Justice Elena Kagan went ever further, suggesting that the administration was endorsing a position that could come back to haunt the federal government in court.

“The United States is usually pretty stingy about standing law, so it did surprise me, in much the way that it surprised the chief justice, that you’re coming in here with a theory which, to my mind, threatens to kind of explode standing doctrine,” she said. “Isn’t that something that the United States should be very worried about?”

Wall insisted that finding standing for the plaintiffs in the current case wouldn’t “open the floodgates” to suits against massive pieces of legislation because the challengers here have unusually good arguments that the whole statute should be struck down if the mandate is unconstitutional.

Still, the exchanges called to mind the fact that Attorney General William Barr reportedly opposed the administration’s signing on to the states’ suit. Did he foresee the static his department would take from the justices for doing so?

The pandemic? What pandemic?

The ubiquitous undercurrent to so many parts of American life these days — the coronavirus pandemic — got short shrift at Tuesday’s arguments, despite the fact that the session focused on a bill that provides health care coverage to tens of millions of Americans and important benefits to a couple hundred million more.

There were only two explicit references to the viral outbreak. Justice Clarence Thomas asked early in the arguments whether someone who did not want to wear a mask would have standing to sue over a law mandating mask wearing, even if it was accompanied by no penalty. And Mongan, the California solicitor general, noted in passing in one of his statements to the court that eliminating the law would “cast 20 million Americans off health insurance during a pandemic.”

Of course, there was another reminder of the virus: The court continues to hear arguments virtually, avoiding the dangers of gathering the justices, lawyers, reporters and others. A high-profile argument like the one held on Tuesday would’ve been packed to the gills if held in the justices’ ornate courtroom across the street from the Capitol.

The audio-only arrangements were fairly smooth on Tuesday, with only one significant glitch. Breyer called on himself after a long pause in which Roberts didn’t seem to call on anyone. The chief justice then abruptly cut Breyer off, prompting the court’s eldest justice to declare somewhat cryptically: “Something happened. I’m sorry. My machine didn’t work.”

A couple minute later, Roberts apologized and came back to Breyer, but he demurred. “It’s not a problem,” Breyer said. “Go ahead. I’m good.”

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As presidential dust settles, New York City turns its eyes to historic mayoral race

NEW YORK — Hundreds of supporters filled the street outside Bill de Blasio’s Park Slope row house in January of 2013 to witness him launch a long-shot bid to become New York City’s 109th mayor.

It was a lively affair, the size of the crowd belying de Blasio's underdog status at the time. Bundled in winter gear, supporters chanted his name as he delivered a soaring speech pledging his commitment to New Yorkers disappointed in the technocratic tenure of multi-billionaire Mike Bloomberg.

Nearly eight years later, with the city in the throes of a ceaseless pandemic, the election to replace de Blasio is shaping up to be a very different race.

Two candidates looking to succeed him next year, Scott Stringer and Maya Wiley, announced their campaigns at relatively muted affairs. They each gathered just a few dozen supporters who sat several feet apart, their faces and cheers obscured by masks, as they somberly promised to guide the city through a time of profound crisis. Other candidates, including Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, past Citigroup executive Ray McGuire and former nonprofit head Dianne Morales, must navigate concerns over a second wave of Covid-19 as they prepare to announce their bids in the coming weeks.

As the presidential election draws to a close, the contest to succeed de Blasio, whose term ends on Dec. 31, 2021, will be unlike any other in city history. It features a crowded field of contestants who must consider both the growing progressive wing of the Democratic Party and a creeping unease over safety, the economy and quality-of-life matters in a city transformed by the ongoing pandemic.

“This will look different than any race, except for the very bizarre eight-week run between Sept. 11 and the November general back in 2001,” Jonathan Rosen, a consultant who worked on de Blasio’s 2013 race, said in a recent interview. “Then, as in now, the city faced real existential questions about its future. Unlike then, the pandemic and what it means for the city is yet to be determined and there’s no end in sight.”

The virus-era restriction on gatherings is not the only novel factor in the upcoming election.

The primary contest — which will likely decide the race in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans 8-to-1 — has been moved by state law from September to June, compressing the political calendar and robbing candidates of standard summer opportunities to connect with voters.

If Covid-19 continues apace, gone will be the annual parades commemorating American soldiers during Memorial Day weekend and Puerto Rican heritage in June. The West Indian American Day parade along Eastern Parkway, an all-but-mandatory stop on every candidate’s path to office, takes place several months after the primary on Labor Day. Campaigns’ in-person efforts to register and turn out voters will likely be complicated.

The pandemic has already begun affecting the rituals of campaigning.

The candidates were forced to skip the traditional, lively Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club visit, instead answering questions from the host on individual Zoom calls. Wiley is launching a series of online forums titled “People’s Assemblies,” which will run from Nov. 16 through Dec. 15 and will provide voters a chance to interact with her on issues.

In-person fundraisers are smaller, presenting a difficulty for newer candidates in raising money, according to several campaign advisers. As a result, they are relying more on social media and online efforts. Further changing the roadmap is a new, voluntary campaign finance system that limits individual donations while increasing the size of taxpayer-funded matches.

Even if the virus abates and restrictions are lifted during the election, the earlier primary means candidates will not have a chance to schmooze with voters at street fairs and block parties.

The advent of ranked-choice voting, which will make its debut next year, is another big factor altering the election's dynamics. Backed by government reform groups — as well as Stringer and Wiley — it is intended to avoid subsequent runoff elections in inconclusive primaries by allowing voters to rank their choices. But the reform, approved by voters on a ballot question last year, is being challenged by people close to established Democratic organizations who argue it will ultimately disenfranchise Black and Latino voters.

“I will call it BS forever. We can undo the law. We are going to have more than 10 candidates per race. More people's vote will not count because people will not rank all 10. We institute a program to ‘empower the minority’ when we are no longer that. We've gentrified our vote,” Patrick Jenkins, a Queens-based political operative, tweeted on Saturday, responding to a post about ranked-choice voting.

In a follow-up interview, Jenkins said he is discussing efforts to delay the reform with lawmakers in the City Council.

Jenkins is close to Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, a powerful figure in the Bronx Democratic Party, but said his opposition to the measure is his alone.

“Now that minorities are the majority in this city, things like ranked-choice voting are there to dilute their power,” Jenkins said.

Supporters of the measure are holding educational training sessions ahead of the election, and argue it will better reflect the will of voters, particularly in crowded races.

Dennis Walcott, a deputy mayor for Mike Bloomberg and current president of the Queens Public Library, said ranked-choice voting will change how candidates craft their messages.

“Vote for me, but then vote for this person in the second slot. I think it really raises a level of sophistication in how you campaign,” Walcott, who volunteered on Bloomberg’s 2005 and 2009 campaigns, said in an interview. “You’re campaigning, but you don’t necessarily have the hand-holding that’s going on in the streets to reinforce your message.”

“The other piece is you really can’t dog that many people because there are implications in really trying to tear other people down,” he added.

Walcott is also a regular church attendee in Southeast Queens, and often accompanied Bloomberg to church services when he was running for re-election. Some of the city’s larger religious institutions, such as the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn, are regular stops for candidates looking to connect with large audiences of consistent voters.

To that end, Walcott said most churches are holding Zoom sessions, which enable candidates to cut down on travel time and connect with even more potential voters than they normally would — albeit without any in-person contact.

Jessica Ramos, a state Senator from Queens and surrogate for Stringer’s campaign, agreed the tactic of trying to appeal to every voter rather than discounting certain blocs is likely to discourage negative campaigning.

“It really will bring us closer to being much more solution-oriented, which is what I’ve always thought government should be, and it’s hard when electoral politics get in the way,” Ramos said in a recent interview.

She said she recently participated in a cell phone poll that she believes was conducted on behalf of a mayoral candidate.

Ramos said the survey, which lasted for 18 minutes, inquired about her race and education level and the importance of a spate of issues including the pandemic, crime, public transportation, racism, the economy, public schools and homelessness. It specifically inquired about Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams’ history as a police officer, she said.

She was asked what she thinks of several mayoral hopefuls, including Stringer, Wiley, Adams, McGuire, former Obama and Bloomberg official Shaun Donovan, former de Blasio commissioner Kathryn Garcia and City Council Member Carlos Menchaca.

Many of the candidates volunteered for Joe Biden in recent weeks as the election wound down, and quickly reminded supporters of their own ticking clocks.

“After four LONG years, we did it,” Wiley wrote in a blast email to supporters. “We can breathe a sigh of relief, and NOW is the time to turn to real solutions to the problems that plague us."

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Senate Republicans urge Trump to keep Gina Haspel atop CIA

As President Donald Trump considers a lame-duck purge of top administration officials, Senate Republicans are urging him to spare at least one: CIA Director Gina Haspel.

Interviews with members of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday revealed broad support for the embattled spy chief, who has drawn the president’s ire amid her refusal to carry out some of his demands related to the Russia investigation.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the chairman of the Intelligence panel, said there was no reason to fire Haspel other than Trump’s personal preferences.

“Obviously any director serves at the pleasure of the president, and I’m not the president,” Rubio said in a brief interview after a 90-minute closed-door briefing with Haspel at the Capitol on Tuesday. “But if you ask me my opinion, I think she’s done a good job.”

Like other Republicans, Rubio said that “it would be good for the stability at the agency” for Haspel to remain in place, especially as the federal bureaucracy prepares for a transition to President-elect Joe Biden’s administration.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a member of the Intelligence Committee and the GOP leadership team, similarly praised Haspel when asked about her job status, calling her a “good public servant” and rejecting the notion that she should be fired.

Republicans’ words of support for Haspel come as Trump continues to block cooperation with Biden’s transition team, which has yet to receive the federal funds and access to other resources that are necessary to kick-start the transfer of power. While the president falsely claims he won the election, Republicans have largely stood by him as he challenges the election results in several states.

But some, like Rubio, have encouraged the Trump administration to aid a Biden transition by taking steps that include briefing the president-elect on the most sensitive classified information that the commander in chief receives on a daily basis. That process would be led by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which has not yet engaged with the Biden transition team.

“I don’t think it prejudices the president’s legal claims in any way to begin the transition work, just in case,” Rubio said, though he has largely deferred to the Trump campaign’s long-shot legal challenges before recognizing Biden as the president-elect.

Rubio’s counterpart atop the Intelligence Committee, Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-Va.), has warned that a haphazard and unstable transition process could benefit foreign adversaries seeking to exploit vulnerabilities in the U.S. national security apparatus. And the 9/11 Commission Report stated that the delayed presidential transition after the 2000 election — prompted by the recount in Florida — made the U.S. less prepared for terrorism threats on Sept. 11, 2001.

“I worry about the people who have shown some degree of integrity being removed. I definitely worry about that,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said. “That’s what Trump does. And he’s getting more and more desperate as he realizes the election results.”

Rubio said Haspel’s job status did not come up during the committee’s meeting with her. But immediately after the briefing with senators, Haspel was spotted entering Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office.

A spokesman for the Kentucky Republican declined to comment, and Haspel did not answer questions from reporters about whether she was concerned about her employment. A CIA representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

On Monday, Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper, fueling concerns that the president would fire additional officials perceived to be disloyal to him. McConnell and the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), had urged Trump to leave Esper in place, POLITICO previously reported.

Haspel, a career intelligence officer, was confirmed by the Senate two and a half years ago with bipartisan support. But Trump has soured on Haspel lately, according to sources familiar with the matter, because she has opposed the declassification of documents related to the 2016-era Russia investigation.

One document in particular that Haspel opposed disclosing was a memo that detailed an unverified Russian intelligence assessment that Hillary Clinton signed off on a plan to tie Trump to the hacking of the Democratic National Committee in 2016. POLITICO previously reported that the Senate Intelligence Committee immediately rejected the veracity of the information once learning of it.

In addition to Haspel, Trump is reportedly considering firing FBI Director Christopher Wray, who the president and his allies think has been uncooperative in an effort by Senate Republicans and other investigative bodies to examine the Russia probe.

Natasha Bertrand and Marianne LeVine contributed to this report.

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Biden pledges Americans won't lose health coverage during pandemic

President-elect Joe Biden said Tuesday that his advisers are making contingencies so Americans don't have to worry about losing health coverage or protections for preexisting conditions during the pandemic, but did not specify what his administration would do if the Supreme Court strikes down Obamacare.

Speaking just hours after the Court heard oral arguments on a Republican-backed challenge to the Affordable Care Act, Biden called the attempt to scrap the law "cruel," and said that his incoming administration will make sure millions of people don’t have to spend the months between now and when the Court issues its ruling in limbo, not knowing the status of their coverage.

“They need a lifeline and they need it now,” he said. “They shouldn't have to hold their breath. They shouldn't be in that position, waiting to see if the Supreme Court is going to wrench away a peace of mind they’ve come to now rely on.”

Biden vowed on Tuesday to work with Congress to “dramatically ramp up health care protections” and “get Americans universal coverage.” He also reiterated campaign pledges to tackle the prescription drug costs and expand coverage to the millions of uninsured people — a group that's grown significantly during the pandemic and economic crash.

“I promise you this beginning on Jan. 20, the Vice President-elect Harris and I, we’re going to do everything in our power to ease the burden of health care on you and your family,” he said. “I will protect your health care like I protect my kids with my own family.”

Yet Biden’s health plans, including the creation of a public insurance option to compete with private insurance and more generous subsidies for middle class consumers, depend on the Affordable Care Act being in place. And though the majority of justices on Tuesday appeared unlikely to side with the Trump administration and red state arguments that the entire law should be struck down, the uncertainty will hang over health care markets possibly through spring. And if Republicans keep control of the Senate and the law is struck down, Democrats’ hopes for passing a replacement would be quashed.

Both Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris described the Obamacare lawsuit as an attempt to “overturn the will of the people” following multiple unsuccessful attempts by Republican lawmakers to repeal the law in Congress, and cited their election night win as evidence that the public does not want the ACA’s protections eliminated.

“Health care was very much on the ballot in 2020,” Harris said. “Each and every vote for Joe Biden was a statement that health care should be a right and not a privilege. Each and every vote for Joe Biden was a call to protect and expand the Affordable Care Act, not to tear it away in the midst of a global pandemic.”

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FDA grants emergency authorization for Lilly antibody treatment

The FDA has authorized the emergency use of Eli Lilly's antibody treatment for the coronavirus.

The drug, known as a monoclonal antibody, mimics the body's natural defenses against the virus.

The emergency authorization, which FDA released Monday, allows the drug to be used in adults and children over the age of 12 with mild to moderate Covid-19 symptoms who are at high risk of progressing to severe disease or requiring hospitalization. Lilly has published limited data from a late-stage trial showing that the antibody reduces the amount of virus in a person's body, and seems to speed recovery.

The drug has been tested on patients in and out of hospital settings with mixed success. The National Institutes of Health ended a trial last month of Lilly's antibody treatment in hospitalized coronavirus patients because the drug did not show a benefit. Two ongoing trials are testing an antibody cocktail made by another company, Regeneron, in hospitalized patients, and both companies are testing their drugs in less severely ill patients.

"Authorization of this new Eli Lilly antibody treatment is a significant step forward in treating patients and bridging us to the rollout of safe and effective vaccines, with all of these efforts made possible by #OperationWarpSpeed," Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar tweeted, referring to the government's drug and vaccine accelerator.

It is not clear why the agency acted to authorize use of Lilly's antibody ahead of Regeneron's antibody cocktail. The companies applied for emergency-use authorization last month within days of each other.

“We continue productive discussions with the FDA around our EUA submission but don’t expect action tonight,” a Regeneron spokesperson said.

The FDA's action on the Lilly drug came on the same day that Pfizer revealed its coronavirus vaccine was more than 90 percent effective in early data from its Phase III U.S. trial, raising hopes that a shot will soon be available. But public health experts inside and outside the government have noted that the first vaccines will likely be in short supply, creating a gap that antibody treatments could help fill.

President Donald Trump, who received the Regeneron antibody cocktail during his bout with Covid-19 in early October and referred to the drug as a "cure," pressured the FDA to quickly authorize such treatments. The authorization may make it more difficult for Regeneron and Lilly to complete their ongoing studies, and for trials of other antibody treatments to attract participants.

Possible shortages: One major drawback to the antibody treatments is that they are difficult to manufacture rapidly at scale. Some experts, like Regeneron CEO Len Schleifer and former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb, have warned that there won't be enough antibody treatment doses for everyone who needs one.

"Given limited supply and cost for further doses, the use cases are limited," said Nahid Bhadelia, an infectious disease expert at the Boston University School of Medicine. "I see it potentially being helpful in outbreaks in high risk areas like nursing homes where high risk patients are proactively diagnosed and treated early."

Regardless, she said, "it would be important to ramp up testing so we can find positive high risk patients earlier."

The administration's Operation Warp Speed expects more than 1 million doses of the infusions to be ready by the end of 2020. The Trump administration has signed a $450 million deal with Regeneron to provide up to 300,000 doses of its antibody cocktail, and a $375 million deal with Lilly for 300,000 doses of its drug.

The government has said it will provide those doses to Americans at no cost.

"We’ll have enough to get us into the new year before vaccines," said Paul Mango, HHS deputy chief of staff for policy, said at briefing in early October.

Regeneron is working with Roche to boost manufacturing capacity and by the end of the year it could have as many as 2 million doses to treat Covid-19, or between 4 million and 8 million doses to help prevent people from getting sick. Lilly also said it would have more than 1 million treatment doses by the end of the year.

What's next: Mango said last month that Warp Speed would work with states to allocate and distribute any antibody treatment that received FDA authorization. The government has not revealed what criteria it will use to determine supplies for each state. But Lilly said in a press release Monday that it would immediately begin shipping its antibody to AmerisourceBergen, the distribution company that will ship the drug out on the government's behalf.

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Trump removes head of climate science report

The White House has removed the head of the program that produces the federal government's most definitive scientific report on climate change, according to three sources with knowledge of the move.

Michael Kuperberg had worked as executive director of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which produces the National Climate Assessment. The move comes just days after the White House tapped Betsy Weatherhead to lead the sweeping climate study. Weatherhead joined the U.S. Geological Survey after working at climate analytics firm Jupiter Intelligence.

POLITICO received an automatic reply from Kuperberg's USGCRP email address that indicated his detail there ended Nov. 6 and that he was heading back to the Energy Department.

Context: Kuperberg’s reassignment is the latest in a string of high-level personnel moves to remove officials deemed insufficiently loyal to President Donald Trump after his reelection loss. Earlier on Monday, Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper. On Friday, Neil Chatterjee was removed as FERC chair on Friday after advocating for opening up markets to renewable sources and exploring carbon pricing.

Background: Congress requires the federal government to produce updated NCA reports, the authoritative government-wide report on climate change, every few years. It is produced by the USGCRP, which coordinates contributions from 13 government agencies.

The most recent edition, the fourth version, was issued in 2018, and despite concerns that Trump administration officials would tamper with its findings, was widely praised as accurately portraying the threat posed by climate change.

Kuperberg's departure comes in the wake of the Trump administration hiring of David Legates, an academic at the University of Delaware who has written that "carbon dioxide is plant food and is not a pollutant," to a newly created political position at NOAA.

The news: Kuperberg had run the USGCRP since 2015 and was expected to remain there until the fifth edition was completed in 2023. An administration official who was not authorized to speak publicly confirmed Kuperberg's move and said the change was a surprise.

The White House did not have an on-the-record comment about Kuperberg's removal. Climate scientist Don Wuebbles confirmed to POLITICO that Kuperberg was informed by email on Friday that he was getting sent back to his post at DOE.

Much of the work on the next assessment will take place during the Biden administration, but Trump officials might still influence the report in its remaining months. Nov. 14 marks the deadline for author nominations, and a new executive director could push for the program to select nominees that have views more aligned with Trump's on climate change.

But NOAA Chief Scientist Ryan Maue, another recent Trump appointee, said he imagined Weatherhead would continue on as the climate assessment lead, and noted the incoming Biden administration could make changes.

“The election obviously changed the calculus on a lot of things," Maue told POLITICO.

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Boris Johnson defeated on plan to breach international law over Brexit

The bill is set to return to the Commons in December, when MPs are likely to reinsert the offending clauses.

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Republicans already racing to fill Trump power vacuum

President Donald Trump’s defeat has set off a flurry of activity as would-be successors start to position themselves for 2024 and a battle to lead a Trump-less Republican Party begins to take shape.

Likely Republican candidates are about to descend on Georgia to campaign in a pair of Senate runoffs that will determine control of the chamber. They're taking to Fox News to defend Trump's refusal to concede. The Republican National Committee is bracing for a possible fight over its chairmanship. And Donald Trump Jr. is aggressively staking out a role as a future GOP powerbroker.

Party officials, meanwhile, are grappling with how to keep intact the massive political infrastructure that Trump helped assemble with him on his way out of the White House.

While Trump has been defeated, he has not been vanquished. After receiving the second-highest popular vote total in history, and enjoying a core of supporters numbering tens of millions strong, he is positioned to wield outsized power over where the GOP goes from here. Anyone who wants to run in 2024 will have a hard time winning the nomination against his opposition.

"Trump is leaving office but he has changed the political DNA of the party for the foreseeable future," said GOP strategist Ken Spain, a former top National Republican Congressional Committee official. "Presidential candidates and congressional leaders will continue to ally themselves with the ascendant blue-collar wing of the GOP."

Yet Trump's loss also means the party will need to find a way to distinguish itself from a president who turned off a majority of voters.

The Georgia races give 2024 GOP aspirants an immediate platform to showcase what they can do for the party. Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton is expected to make multiple trips to the state, where Georgia Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler are facing Jan. 5 runoffs. If both lose, Democrats would assume control of the Senate.

Florida Sen. Rick Scott is slated to make his first appearance later this week and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott is also likely to travel there. Former UN Ambassodor Nikki Haley issued a pair of tweets over the weekend asking for help in Georgia. Donald Trump Jr. also took to his social media account to highlight the runoffs, and a spokesman for the younger Trump said to “expect him to be very involved.”

“It’ll be like Iowa during the straw poll era. A modern-day Ames in the Peach State,” said Georgia-based Republican strategist Chip Lake, referring to the contest that’s been a rite-of-passage for presidential hopefuls ahead of the Iowa caucuses.

Looking to curry favor with Trump’s supporters, would-be candidates are taking to Fox News to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Biden’s win and to call declarations of his victory premature. Appearing Sunday morning, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said, “The media is desperately trying to get everyone to coronate Joe Biden as the next president.”

Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley went on Trump-favorite Tucker Carlson’s program to announce he planned to introduce an election integrity bill. And during a Thursday appearance on Laura Ingraham’s show, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis suggested that state legislatures could override vote counts in their states and appoint Trump electors.

Party officials predict that ambitious Republicans will use Trump’s lame duck period to rally the conservative base by going after President-elect Joe Biden and his cabinet nominees.

Two potential 2024 contenders, meanwhile, are poised to take on leadership roles that will give them entrée to powerful donors. Rick Scott has launched a run for the chairmanship of the National Republican Senatorial Committee and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey is expected to take the reins of the Republican Governors Association.

Donald Trump Jr., meanwhile, is moving to demonstrate his influence over the party and to enforce loyalty to the president. The younger Trump tweeted out to his 6.2 million followers last week that “the total lack of action from virtually all of the ‘2024 GOP hopefuls’ in highlighting election fraud “is pretty amazing.”

“They have a perfect platform to show that they’re willing & able to fight but they will cower to the media mob instead,” Trump added. “Don’t worry @realDonaldTrump will fight & they can watch as usual!”

The warning shot sent 2024 hopefuls scrambling. Within minutes Haley tweeted that Trump “and the American people deserve transparency & fairness as the votes are counted” and Cotton directed his followers to “Support Trump's legal fund.”

But the dust-up has illustrated the differences between future candidates as they grapple with how to align themselves with Trump. Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, who has clashed with the president, has taken a more nuanced approach, saying that “all legal votes need to be counted” and that “this is our American system and it works.”

While Donald Trump Jr. himself is frequently mentioned as a 2024 candidate, those close to him say he’s more interested in leveraging his influence to help like-minded conservatives. He's expected to campaign extensively for candidates in the 2022 midterms.

Republicans also face imminent question questions about their political organization without Trump the White House. The party is gearing up for a January race for RNC chair; sitting GOP chairwoman Ronna McDaniel has yet to announce whether she’ll seek a third term, though she would likely be regarded as the frontrunner should she do so.

Ohio GOP chairwoman Jane Timken has also been mentioned as a potential candidate. And Republicans have buzzed about California party Committeemember Harmeet Dhillon, who took to Twitter Saturday to call for “a hard family conversation about several specific rotting organizations and a class of mediocre but cunning grifters who control the establishment.”

Reached by email Sunday, Dhillon said she was not considering a bid for the RNC post.

Without a clear leader who can raise money for the party, Republicans have begun discussing how to ensure their apparatus remains well-funded. Trump used his fundraising sway to help bankroll a sprawling field, data, and digital program.

“What we’ve seen in the past is, when President Bush left office, the data and ground game systems that are so important can lose prioritization and funding,” said Mike Shields, a former RNC chief of staff. “If President Trump doesn’t win, then we really face an important period of time to ensure that party leadership really prioritizes and puts resources into the ecosystem because they won’t have a titular head of the party like Trump doing it.”

Other party officials have begun talking about the desire to form an outside group devoted to taking on the Biden White House. While Republicans have super PACs focused on House and Senate races, they say there is a need for a well-funded group that can rally conservative opposition to Biden's agenda.

Holding Democrats “accountable at all levels aggressively is not a choice but a requirement for Republicans and their affiliated super PACs for the foreseeable future,” said Chris LaCivita, a Republican strategist who oversaw an anti-Biden outside group during the 2020 campaign.

For all the early deliberations about the GOP’s future, people close to the president say he’s not going to disappear. Trump aides predict that he’ll want to have influence over the party and that he’ll aggressively go after Biden.

They're also convinced he’ll remain deeply involved in House and Senate races. The president spent part of Election Day quizzing House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and White House political director Brian Jack about down-ballot races.

“He sure as hell doesn’t look to be planning to ride off into the sunset anytime soon,” said Terry Sullivan, the campaign manager on Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential bid.

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Pandemic on course to overwhelm U.S. health system before Biden takes office

The United States’ surging coronavirus outbreak is on pace to hit nearly 1 million new cases a week by the end of the year — a scenario that could overwhelm health systems across much of the country and further complicate President-elect Joe Biden’s attempts to coordinate a response.

Biden, who is naming his own coronavirus task force Monday, has pledged to confront new shortages of protective gear for health workers and oversee distribution of masks, test kits and vaccines while beefing up contact tracing and reengaging with the World Health Organization. He will also push Congress to pass a massive Covid-19 relief package and pressure the governors who’ve refused to implement mask mandates for new public health measures as cases rise.

But all of those actions — a sharp departure from the Trump administration’s patchwork response that put the burden on states— will have to wait until Biden takes office. Congress, still feeling reverberations from the election, may opt to simply run out the clock on its legislative year. Meanwhile, the virus is smashing records for new cases and hospitalizations as cold weather drives gatherings indoors and people make travel plans for the approaching holidays.

“If you want to have a better 2021, then maybe the rest of 2020 needs to be an investment in driving the virus down,” said Cyrus Shahpar, a former emergency response leader at the CDC who now leads the outbreak tracker Covid Exit Strategy. “Otherwise we’re looking at thousands and thousands of deaths this winter.”

The country’s health care system is already buckling under the load of the resurgent outbreak that’s approaching 10 million cases nationwide. The number of Americans hospitalized with Covid-19 has spiked to 56,000, up from 33,000 one month ago. In many areas of the country, shortages of ICU beds and staff are leaving patients piled up in emergency rooms. And nearly 1,100 people died on Saturday alone, according to the Covid Tracking Project.

“That’s three jetliners full of people crashing and dying,” said David Eisenman, director of the UCLA Center for Public Health and Disasters. “And we will do that every day and then it will get more and more.”

The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation predicts 370,000 Americans will be dead by Inauguration Day, exactly one year after the first U.S. case of Covid-19 was reported. Nearly 238,000 have already died.

The task force Biden announces Monday will be staffed with public health experts and former government officials, many of whom ran agencies during the Obama and Clinton administrations — including former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler, New York University’s Dr. Celine Gounder, Yale’s Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, former Obama White House aide Dr. Zeke Emanuel and former Chicago Health Commissioner Dr. Julie Morita, who is now an executive vice president at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Shahpar said that even before Biden takes control of government in January, he and his team can make a difference by breaking with Trump’s declarations that the virus is “going away,” communicating the severity of the virus’ spread and encouraging people to take precautions as winter approaches.

“There’s been a misalignment between the reality on the ground and what our leaders are telling us,” he said. “Hopefully now those things will come closer together.”

But Shahpar and other experts warn that even if Biden and his task force start promoting public health measures now, it will take weeks to see a reduction in hospitalizations and deaths — even if states clamp down. And there is little indication that the country will drastically change its behavior in the near term.

Some governors in the Northeast, which was hit hard early in the pandemic, are imposing new restrictions. In the last week, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island activated nightly stay-at-home orders and ordered businesses to close by 10 p.m. And Maine Democratic Gov. Janet Mills on Thursday ordered everyone to wear a mask in public, even if they can maintain social distance.

But in the Dakotas and other states where the virus is raging, governors are resisting calls from health experts to mandate masks and restrict gatherings. On Sunday morning, South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem incorrectly attributed her state's huge surge in cases to an increase in testing and praised Trump's approach of giving her the "flexibility to do the right thing." The state has no mask mandate.

And unlike earlier waves in the spring and summer that were confined to a handful of states or regions, the case numbers are now surging everywhere.

In New Mexico, the number of people in the hospital has nearly doubled in just the last two weeks and state officials said Thursday that they expect to run out of general hospital beds in a matter of days.

“November is going to be really rough on all of us,” said Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham — a contender to lead the Department of Health and Human Services in Biden’s administration. “There’s nothing we can do, nothing, that will change the trajectory. … It is too late to dramatically reduce the number of deaths. November is done.”

Minnesota officials said last week that ICU beds in the Twin Cities metro area were 98 percent full, and in El Paso, Texas, the county morgue bought another refrigerated trailer to deal with the swelling body count.

“We had patients stacking up in our ER,” Jeffrey Sather, the chief of staff at Trinity Health in North Dakota said during a news conference last week. “The normal process is we call around to the larger hospitals and ask them to accept our patients. We found no other hospitals that could care for our patients.”

An “ensemble” forecast used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — based on the output of several independent models — projects that the country could see as many as 11,000 deaths and 960,000 cases per week by the end of the month. Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory suggest that the U.S. will record another 6 million infections and 45,000 deaths over the next six weeks, while a team at Cal Tech predicts roughly 1,000 people will die of Covid-19 every day this month — with more than 260,000 dead by Thanksgiving. The University of Washington model forecasts 259,000 Americans dead by Thanksgiving and 313,000 dead by Christmas.

Eisenman predicted that by January, the United States could see infection rates as high as those seen during the darkest days of the pandemic in Europe — 200,000 new cases per day.

“Going into Thanksgiving people are going to start to see family and get together indoors,” he said. “Then the cases will spread from that and then five weeks later we have another set of holidays and people will gather then and by January, we will be exploding with cases.”

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Rick Bright, Atul Gawande on Biden’s covid task force

The Biden-Harris transition team will announce a Covid-19 “transition advisory board” on Monday that includes a dozen high-profile doctors, two people with knowledge of the announcement told POLITICO.

POLITICO last week first reported that President-elect Joe Biden planned to announce a Covid-19 task force after the election, in line with his vow to begin preparing to tackle the surging pandemic before Inauguration Day. Previously unreported members of the panel include Rick Bright, who was ousted as chief of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority earlier this year and became an outspoken critic of the Trump administration before leaving government last month.

The Biden team also will tap high-profile surgeon and New Yorker writer Atul Gawande, who worked at HHS during the Clinton administration and recently led a health care joint venture between Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan known as Haven.

Other members of the advisory group include Luciana Borio, who served as the FDA’s acting chief scientist and on the National Security Council during the Trump administration, and University of Minnesota infectious disease specialist Michael Osterholm.

The task force also includes UCSF’s Eric Goosby, who helped shape HIV/AIDS policy during the Clinton and Obama administration; UCSF emergency physician Robert Rodriguez; and Loyce Pace of the Global Health Council.

The advisory board’s co-chairs are former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, former FDA Commissioner David Kessler and Yale’s Marcella Nunez-Smith. The group also includes NYU’s Celine Gounder, Obama White House aide Zeke Emanuel and RWJF’s Julie Morita, POLITICO previously reported.

The Biden-Harris transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is set to convene a meeting of its own coronavirus task force on Monday, led by Vice President Mike Pence, after that task force’s efforts were largely shunted aside this fall during President Donald Trump’s focus on his re-election bid.

There have been about 10 million confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the United States, and the pandemic shows no signs of slowing, public health experts have warned.

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Obamacare faces Supreme Court remade by Trump

President Donald Trump will leave office without making good on his pledge to wipe out Obamacare. But the Supreme Court he reshaped will soon indicate if it'll finish the job.

The court will hear a lawsuit Tuesday that likely represents Republicans’ last chance to knock out a health care law they’ve opposed for over a decade, and that President-elect Joe Biden is vowing to expand. One of the most-watched participants at the oral arguments will be Trump’s latest appointee to the high court, Amy Coney Barrett. Democrats during last month’s confirmation hearings portrayed her as the pivotal vote who could bring about the law’s demise amid an intensifying pandemic that’s sickened millions.

The case takes up whether Congress, by eliminating the penalty for not having health insurance, made all of Obamacare unconstitutional. It marks the third major challenge to the health care law heard by the Supreme Court and is regarded in legal circles as perhaps the weakest among those. Few in the $3.6 trillion health care industry believe even the court’s fortified 6-3 conservative majority would overturn a law whose protections for people with preexisting conditions and coverage for 20 million Americans have become essential features of American health care.

But the law’s survival depends on support from at least two conservative justices – likely including at least one of Trump’s picks. Tuesday’s hearing will show the first clues about whether Barrett is “not hostile” to the Affordable Care Act, as she said during her confirmation hearing, or if she is aligned with the law’s harshest critics.

A decision against the law could disrupt health insurance for millions, creating a new crisis for Biden’s administration with little expectation that a divided Congress could agree on a quick fix. A ruling is expected to come as soon as February but could take longer.

“I think most people see it as highly unlikely that the law gets struck down. But if the entire law is struck down, it will be very serious chaos,” said Brendan Buck, a health care communications strategist who advised then-House Speaker Paul Ryan during the GOP’s 2017 failed effort to repeal Obamacare.

Trump’s Justice Department and red states challenging the law, led by Texas, will argue Tuesday that Obamacare should be struck down because the law became unconstitutional after Congress in 2017 got rid of penalties for people who don’t have health coverage but kept a requirement that everyone must buy insurance. A coalition of blue states led by California and the Democratic-led House of Representatives are defending the law.

Democrats in the past two election cycles have highlighted the lawsuit’s threat to health coverage, emphasizing their defense of the law’s insurance protections while attacking Republicans for their lack of a replacement plan. While the strategy helped the party win back the House two years ago, Democrats lost seats last week and will fall short of reclaiming the Senate majority if they can’t win a pair of Georgia runoff elections in early January. A loss in Georgia would limit the party’s ability to make repairs to Obamacare without needing Republican votes should the Supreme Court undercut the law.

Some Republican lawmakers, still stung by the party’s failed run at repeal during Trump’s first year in office, have sought to distance themselves from this lawsuit. Even as Trump rooted for the court to overturn Obamacare, Republican senators during Barrett’s confirmation hearing sought to downplay the possibility she would vote to overturn the law.

“I don’t think it’s likely to happen,” Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said at the time. “A lot of the ACA is just baked into the system.”

Speculation over Barrett’s vote in the case has centered around her previous criticism of Chief Justice John Roberts’ ruling upholding Obamacare the first time the law came before the court. Barrett told the Senate last month that she’s not “on a mission to destroy” Obamacare, but like most recent nominees she offered few details on how she would approach this case or any other.

During one notable exchange, Barrett said that courts shouldn’t strike down an entire law if they could instead just extract a flawed provision. At the same time, she said, that legal doctrine, known as “severability,” doesn’t apply if the contested provision is essential to the law’s functioning.

Severability is a central issue to the Obamacare case, California v. Texas. The red states and DOJ argue the law was rendered unconstitutional after Congress in its 2017 tax-cut package struck the penalty for not having health insurance — but left the individual mandate itself on the books. Since the Supreme Court previously ruled the penalty is what made the coverage mandate constitutional, Obamacare’s challengers contend the mandate alone, even a now-toothless one, is problematic. And if the mandate falls, so must the rest of the law, they say.

Supporters of the health care law, and even some critics, believe that argument is faulty. Even if the mandate is now unconstitutional, they say it can be cleanly removed from the law without damaging the insurance protections and its many other provisions, like Medicaid expansion to millions of low-income adults, lower drug costs for seniors and reforms to how health care is delivered. Congress’ decision to scrap just the mandate penalty after the GOP’s broader Obamacare repeal effort collapsed is proof that lawmakers believed Obamacare could survive without penalizing people who forgo coverage.

“The 2017 change in the tax law — that this made the entire law unconstitutional is a really long mile to travel, constitutionally and logically,” said California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who’s leading Obamacare’s legal defense.

Health insurers who are now largely profiting from Obamacare say that the elimination of the mandate penalty hasn’t hurt the law’s insurance marketplaces or undermined its coverage protections. Even as the Trump administration urges the court to overturn Obamacare, it also brags about how well the law’s insurance marketplaces are performing on its watch.

“The individual markets have remained stable, and in fact they’ve seen more plans participating in certain markets, premiums going down,” said Pratik Shah, counsel for the main insurance trade association America’s Health Insurance Plans.

Though the Obamacare lawsuit was seen as a longshot when it was introduced almost three years ago, it’s passed reviews from Republican-appointed justices who’ve reviewed the case. A federal judge in Texas ruled the entire law should be thrown out, and a divided appeals court panel ruled that the individual mandate was unconstitutional without saying if other parts of the law should fall. Critical legal experts attributed those rulings more to the judges’ partisan leanings than sound legal theory.

Conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas ruled against Obamacare in the two previous major challenges and are expected to do so again. Thomas and Trump’s first appointee, Neil Gorsuch, have shown unease with the court’s use of severability to essentially edit laws passed by Congress

Trump’s second appointee, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, is viewed as a likely swing vote in the case. A decision he authored this summer embracing the severability doctrine was seen by court watchers as a cue of how he might rule on the health care law.

Few expect that the chief justice, after authoring two previous opinions upholding Obamacare, would now throw out the law. However, the law’s challengers see a potential opening. They point out that Roberts’ opinion in a 2015 case on Obamacare subsidies explicitly linked the individual mandate penalty to the law’s other “interlocking reforms,” including the protections for preexisting conditions. At the time, the Obama-era Justice Department also argued that the mandate was essential to making the market’s insurance protections work.
“At a minimum you can’t separate the individual mandate from the [insurance protections], which the Supreme Court has said are intertwined,” said Robert Henneke, general counsel at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank that helped bring the lawsuit. In his view, the Supreme Court should at least strike down those protections, including provisions barring insurers from denying people coverage or charging them more because of a medical condition.

This is a scenario that stirs anxiety on Capitol Hill and for the health care industry, given the inability of Republicans and Democrats to come together on even small changes to Obamacare.

“We so fundamentally disagree on how to solve the problem,” said a senior GOP congressional aide. “I think we all agree that we should protect people with pre-existing conditions through a mandate of some form, but we fundamentally disagree on how to do it.”

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Biden swung Georgia left. Now Democrats are racing to do it again.

Georgia Democrats have been talking up their state as a battleground for years. Republicans have been scoffing at the idea for just as long. Now, both parties are racing to figure out exactly how it swung left in 2020 — and whether it can happen again in just nine weeks.

Biden is hanging on to a lead of more than 10,000 votes over President Donald Trump in Georgia with a recount pending, a major shift in a rapidly growing and diversifying state. Georgia went to Trump by 5 points in 2016 and hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1992. But the results are a demonstration of the possible for Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, the two Democrats heading into Jan. 5 Senate runoffs that will decide whether their party controls Congress next year.

The tight presidential vote in Georgia also means Democrats face a challenge reassembling their coalition as the state shifts from a presidential election to an off-year runoff. Republicans have their own questions to answer after the startling presidential results. And when a state splits by fractions of a percentage point, any change is significant.

“Typically, in runoffs, you’re just trying to turn out your voters again … because it’ll be a smaller universe of voters going back to vote without a presidential race going on,” said DeKalb County CEO Michael Thurmond, a Democrat. “And [Warnock and Ossoff] will have to build on the coalition Biden built.”

Biden carried a high share of white voters for a Democrat in Georgia, but Trump may not push white suburbanites away from the GOP as strongly during a lame-duck runoff election as he has for the past four years. State Republicans rely more than ever on rural whites now, but without Trump on the ballot, they may not be as motivated to show up.

And Biden benefited heavily from booming turnout among voters of color, especially Black voters, who have proven their power in Georgia. But Warnock and Ossoff will need to motivate turnout just as high, under very different circumstances, in order to swing the state again.

“Donald Trump changed the election landscape,” said Chip Lake, a Republican consultant who worked for GOP Rep. Doug Collins in the Senate special election, which saw appointed Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler and Warnock advance to January. “What we don’t know is, what happens to the electorate when he is [on his way] out of office and not on the ballot?”

Biden’s narrow Georgia lead was built on the clear, if challenging, path Stacey Abrams laid out in 2018. Abrams, who narrowly lost a run for governor but won Democratic plaudits for her message and talk-to-everybody campaign strategy, energized young voters, registered and turned out record numbers of people of color and peeled away white, college-educated voters in suburban counties, like Cobb and Gwinnett, that turned hard from Republicans in the Trump era.

Abrams, along with the voting-rights group Fair Fight she founded in 2018, also helped expand the electorate since then. Georgia has added 1 million new voters since 2016, thanks to policies allowing voter registration at motor vehicle bureaus as well as efforts by groups like Abrams’. Georgia smashed its own voting record in 2020 with 67 percent of registered voters participating, surpassing the 2008 mark of 63 percent.

In 2019, Abrams wrote that other Democrats could take advantage of the same factors as her history-making campaign, which was “fueled by record-breaking support from white voters and presidential-level turnout and support from the diverse communities of color in our state.”

“All of that foundation [Abrams built] is now what has brought this state into toss-up status for presidential races and for two Senate runoffs,” said Steve Phillips, a Democratic donor and founder of Democracy in Color, a progressive group focused on voters of color. “The blueprint she wrote in 2019 should be a roadmap for the national donor community about how to move resources over the next two months,” who are already lining up on both sides to dump millions of dollars into the race.

According to early exit polls, Biden won 29 percent of white voters, a high-water mark for a Democrat in Georgia, up from 21 percent for Hillary Clinton in 2016. And an analysis of early voting data from Collective PAC, a group focused on growing Black political power, showed that nearly 370,000 Black voters who didn’t vote in 2016 or 2018 showed up in 2020, driving Black turnout higher. Collective PAC targeted that group with 2 million phone calls in the lead up to the election.

Quentin James, founder of Collective PAC, echoed that for Georgia Democrats to win, they need to drive up Black turnout and expand the electorate while seeking support from white voters. But the problem in traditional Democratic politics, James said, “is that significant resources are spent solely on peeling off white voters, and rarely invested in both strategies equally.”

What “Abrams has shown is you can both talk to rural white voters and engage Black men, and you can do it equally,” James added.

“It’s got to be ‘both-and’ — you have to both persuade and energize,” said former state Sen. Jason Carter, the grandson of former President Jimmy Carter and the 2014 Democratic gubernatorial nominee. “We are an evenly divided state, so every vote matters. If you turn someone out who wouldn’t otherwise vote, that’s one vote, and if you change’s someone’s mind, it’s two votes — all of those add up.”

But the gains for Democrats in Georgia were uneven, highlighting points of concern for the party as it prepares to take on Loeffler and GOP Sen. David Perdue in January.

Though Biden built a narrow lead heading into a recount and Democrats picked up a suburban House seat, they fell short in their drive to retake control of either state legislative chamber. Instead, Republicans took out state House Minority Leader Bob Trammell, one of the last rural Democrats, in an expensive fight that illustrated the overwhelming political power Republicans have built in rural counties.

“There was an underestimation for what Trump being on the ballot does to turnout,” Trammel said. “But does that continue in a runoff?”

Meanwhile, keeping hold of voters who disliked Trump may also prove more complicated for Democrats who benefited from overwhelming margins in the Atlanta suburbs, several Republicans said. The president will still be in office on Jan. 5, and it’s unclear what he might do during his lame-duck period, but one thing is clear: Trump won’t be on the ballot, voters will know Biden is taking over, and partisan control of the Senate is at stake.

“In 1996, congressional Republicans ran on being a check to President Clinton because it was clear [Bob] Dole was going to lose, but you couldn’t do that in 2020 because that would’ve been political suicide,” said Brian Robinson, a Republican strategist who served as a spokesman for former GOP Gov. Nathan Deal. “Now, if Biden does win, Loeffler and Perdue can explicitly make that check-and-balance argument, and that’s really powerful.”

At the same time, Republicans are hopeful they can hold on to some of the small gains Trump made with voters of color, noting that a “rural maximization strategy” is not enough to win the state.

“The white voting electorate is now at 53 percent in Georgia, so you can’t get to 49 percent without some non-white votes being a part of your strategy,” Robinson said.

Indeed, Trump cut into Democratic margins with voters of color in the exit polls, and both parties are digging into precinct returns and the voter file to try to confirm that finding. Trump won 11 percent support from Georgia Black voters in the early exit poll results, similar to his 9 percent showing in 2016. His share of Latino voters jumped to 41 percent, up from 27 percent four years ago.

They are unsettling datapoints for Democrats — ones they said are isolated to the 2020 presidential race. “I don’t see that trend continuing down-ballot, nor do I think that will continue without Donald Trump on the ballot,” said Terrance Woodbury, a Democratic pollster who frequently conducts surveys in the state.

That could be good news for both Ossoff and Warnock, who are looking to not only win voters of color but win them by large margins. Some groups are already lining up to support that effort.

ACRONYM, a progressive group, spent $3 million on mobilizing voters of color in Georgia through digital ads. ACRONYM founder Tara McGowan confirmed that they will extend their program through the runoffs, estimating at least a million-dollar investment to target young people of color.

The two Senate races already drew more than $200 million in spending throughout the fall, and they’re expected to match that total in two short months, as big-money groups are prepared to go all in on both races.

“I had donors reach out unsolicited, asking about what they can do to help with the runoffs,” McGowan said.

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Trump digs in as his family and allies spar over a concession

President Donald Trump has spent the hours since Joe Biden was declared his successor in an increasingly lonely environment: Resisting family members’ calls to concede, fending off criticism from every corner of Washington and watching surrogates who once marveled at his stubborn defiance go dark on the airwaves.

For the second time this weekend, the president left the White House in the morning for an outing at his Virginia golf club — a “safe space,” as one administration official described it — for him to weigh his next steps. In recent days, the defeated incumbent has been confronted with a torrent of conflicting advice over how he should spend the remaining months of his presidency. Some in his inner circle have encouraged him to battle the election results until the bitter end, while others privately insist he should simply concede to protect his legacy.

Within Trump’s own family, there appear to be divisions. Trump’s wife, Melania, and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, have been urging the president to think seriously about an exit strategy, according to two people briefed on their discussions. But Trump’s sons Donald Jr. and Eric have continued pugnaciously tweeting away.

At Trump’s campaign, many aides are coming to grips with the reality of a loss. But at campaign headquarters on Sunday, staffers were met with walls covered in print-outs of Trump tweets and a doctored newspaper front page encouraging them to fight on — an idea that came from the highest ranks of the Trump campaign, according to a person familiar with the episode.

Others, like Vice President Mike Pence, have simply gone dark, raising eyebrows among Trump allies.

It’s the same fractious Trump universe that has existed for over four years, in which a consistent message often falls victim to warring factions orbiting Trump. It’s the way numerous decisions have been made during Trump’s presidency: competing power centers push their own agenda publicly and privately, and eventually Trump settles on his preferred approach.

The divides were clearer than ever Sunday morning. As the Trump campaign blasted out a trio of text messages imploring the president’s supporters to financially assist his efforts to “fight back,” and Trump retweeted unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud on Twitter, some of his top allies began publicly congratulating Biden as the incoming commander in chief. Even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose effusive praise for the president has often separated him from other world leaders, said in a tweet on Sunday he was “look[ing] forward to working with” Biden “to further strengthen the special alliance between the U.S. and Israel.”

Hours after Netanyahu’s tweet, the president reiterated his grievances on Twitter, accusing the media of predetermining the election outcome.

“Since when does the Lamestream Media call who our next president will be? We have all learned a lot in the last two weeks!” he wrote at 2 p.m. from his golf club, where a contingent of MAGA demonstrators had sprouted up with flags and homemade signs endorsing the president’s baseless claims of a “rigged” election.

“Election fraud kills American democracy,” read one sign outside the Sterling, Va., country club.

“We want Trump!” chanted other supporters.

But in television appearances over the weekend, some prominent White House allies seemed less convinced of the president’s theories on election fraud and skeptical that his campaign’s legal push to challenge the outcome would yield the desired results.

“Friendship doesn’t mean that you’re blind,” said former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a longtime friend of the president who said the window is closing for Trump to provide evidence of widespread voter fraud to justify his refusal to concede.

“It was so important early on to say to the president, ‘If your basis for not conceding is that there was voter fraud, then show us,’” Christie told ABC’s “This Week.” “Because if you can’t show us, we can’t do this. We can’t back you blindly without evidence.”

On Fox News, guests who have long endorsed Trump’s tactics and defended his administration expressed doubt about the protracted legal battle he has vowed to pursue. Thus far, Trump campaign lawsuits in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Georgia have had little impact, with election lawyers saying the suits have minimal merit and a vanishing chance of succeeding.

Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor who served as a Republican witness during Trump’s impeachment, said on Fox News that the president’s team was “hunting elephants with derringers” as they search for instances of mass voter fraud or misconduct at ballot-counting locations.

“We need something a little more high-caliber if you’re going to take down an election result or determination. So we’re waiting for that evidence to come forward,” Turley said.

Former George W. Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen, a consistent pro-Trump voice on the conservative news channel, recognized Biden as president-elect and said he hoped the incoming Democratic leader could “bring people together.” Some Trump aides who spent the weeks leading up to Election Day breathlessly defending their boss avoided TV appearances altogether, citing concerns about Hatch Act restrictions that preclude government officials from participating in certain partisan activities — a barrier that hadn’t seemed to matter before Nov. 3.

The sudden absence of one top Trump ally was particularly confounding to aides inside the president’s campaign who’ve subscribed to his claims of a “stolen” election.

“Where the hell is Mike Pence?” a senior Trump campaign official wrote in a text message Sunday afternoon, noting the vice president has been missing-in-action save for a single tweet on Nov. 5 calling for “every legal vote” to be counted.

But as Pence maintained a low profile — spending time with Trump at White House but avoiding public appearances — and other allies of the president accepted defeat, Trump found support in other corners.

When staffers arrived at his campaign headquarters Sunday morning, for instance, they were confronted by dozens of printed-out Trump tweets and a faux newspaper front page encouraging them to disregard the outcome and continue fighting on the president’s behalf. “PRESIDENT GORE” read the front-page headline of a Washington Times edition from 2000 that was xeroxed and hung all over the Virginia office space.

Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh deleted a tweet flaunting the newspaper display after the Times noted the image — which came from a newspaper headline about President George W. Bush’s victory in 2000 — had been doctored.

Meanwhile, some Trump allies appearing on the Sunday show circuit echoed the president’s refusal to accept the election results. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich claimed Biden will “have to do a lot to convince Republicans that this is anything except a left-wing power grab financed by people like George Soros.”

“Frankly, I think this is a corrupt stolen election,” Gingrich said during a segment on Fox News.

Other Republicans cast the decision by several networks to call the race for Biden on Saturday morning as premature. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley said Americans will know who won “when all lawful votes have been counted, recounts finished and allegations of fraud addressed,” while House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) asserted “the election is not final” until the president’s lawsuits have been resolved.

As of Sunday, however, Trump’s legal team was still struggling to mount a legal offensive backed by tangible evidence of voter fraud. And some of those closest to Trump, including Melania Trump and Kushner, have been suggesting he look for an eventual off ramp.

While they publicly support the president’s decision to pursue legal recourse, they have nudged him away from condemning the transition of power that must occur before Biden’s January inauguration and have mused about ways in which Trump could concede without explicitly acknowledging he lost.

Still, the president seemed far from ready to concede in any fashion Sunday afternoon. Upon returning to the White House following his round of golf, Trump tweeted a story from the far-right outlet Breitbart News about a team of investigators who were dispatched to a Georgia county over the weekend after officials discovered an alleged issue with the reporting of ballots.

The story concluded that the issue had been resolved.

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‘I loved John McCain’: Inside Arizona’s GOP movement to defeat Donald Trump

PHOENIX — Two years and two months before Arizona’s rebuke of President Donald Trump, hundreds of Republican leaders of the Grand Canyon State crowded into North Phoenix Baptist Church to bid farewell to their hero and mentor, John McCain.

They were met with a tearful eulogy from a special friend of McCain’s.

“My name is Joe Biden. I’m a Democrat. And I loved John McCain,” the former vice president began, sharing anecdotes from their decades-long friendship and recounting their bipartisan victories in the Senate. He called McCain his “brother” and lauded his heroic American story, “grounded in respect and decency.”

Many in the audience had already been riled up by Trump’s famous dismissal of McCain’s years as a POW — “I like people who weren’t captured.” They’d been appalled when, just months earlier, a Trump White House aide allegedly dismissed the opinion of the cancer-stricken McCain because “he’s dying anyway.” They'd been enraged that, two days before the memorial service, Trump had again attacked McCain after reports of his refusal to lower American flags in his honor.

On Election Day, many of them — led by McCain’s widow, Cindy — took revenge: Arizona is on target to choose a Democrat — Biden — for the first time in almost 30 years. Biden's early lead was such that Fox News declared him the winner in the Grand Canyon State on Tuesday, altering the electoral math and pulling the rug out from under Trump’s plans to claim victory in the overall polling before the Biden-leaning mailed ballots were counted in the Midwestern states.

As of Saturday, it appeared that about 100,000 voters in Phoenix's Maricopa County alone, which makes up about half the state's population, voted for Biden and Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Mark Kelly but chose all Republicans for a host of other state offices, said Garrett Archer, the former chief data analyst for the Arizona Secretary of State.

"Generic Republicans down-ballot are winning," he said, including in the state legislature, which was widely predicted to flip into Democratic hands for the first time in more than 50 years but will keep its GOP majority. That suggests many reliably Republican voters had a special animus toward Trump and Sen. Martha McSally, who was banking on her reflexive loyalty to Trump to carry her over the threshold.

Biden's apparent victory in the state, the first for a Democrat since Bill Clinton in 1996, revealed ironies on top of ironies.

Arizona was, in many ways, ground zero of the Trump presidency. It was the prime locus of his furious denunciations of illegal immigrants, which spurred his political rise. It was where he built his signature border wall. It was the home of former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the chain-gang-loving lawman whom Trump pardoned after his conviction for violating a court order, but whom many Republicans had long grown to consider a provocative embarrassment to their party. It was where Trump warred with former Republican Sen. Jeff Flake, a McCain loyalist, but also staged raucous rallies, including a pair in the week before the election.

But in the end, the more moderate, independent politics epitomized by McCain sent Trump packing.

Latino voters appear to have come out in record numbers to back Biden, in a stark repudiation of Trump’s immigration views, even as Trump managed to win the support of many Latinos in Florida and other states.

Trump also lost ground in 2020 with white voters and seniors – whom Biden won outright, according to exit polls. Early indications suggest that Biden won a full 10 percent of Arizona Republicans.

“Now we’re center-leaning left [in Arizona], and that’s a reflection of changing demographics but more recently it’s a reflection of a sizable number of people not being willing to go along with this Trump Party,” said Grant Woods, a former state attorney general and chief of staff to McCain. “Presented with a solid, centrist alternative like Joe Biden, it was a vote they were willing to make.”

That makes Arizona one of the clearest illustrations of Trump paying a price for his bullying behavior and defiance of norms that have been honored by both parties for generations.

Former McCain staffers, including Woods, actively encouraged Arizona’s Republicans to come out in public support of Biden, not just on account of Trump’s poor treatment of McCain but because they believed the former senator would have voted his conscience for Biden, too.

“That network is quite extensive because of him having held elected office since 1982,” said Doug Cole, a former McCain adviser who is now a political consultant.

“The network is out there and it is in the middle of the road and follows John McCain 99 percent of the time,” added Woods.

For many of the “McCainites,” as he called them, Cindy McCain’s moving appearance at the Democratic National Convention was the green light to reject the president. There, she spoke of her husband’s friendship with Biden dating to the ’70s when McCain was the Navy’s liaison to the U.S. Senate.

“Cindy McCain has a sway when you are talking margins,” said Cole. "She’s a college-educated woman, so that solidified with other college-educated women that it was okay to vote for Joe Biden."

A large group of former elected Republicans were also enlisted to endorse Biden, including a former U.S. Attorney, a former chief justice of the state Supreme Court and legislators.

"We had really an impressive list — not your usual ten unknowns or a couple of names," said Woods.

Another leading voice in the effort was Flake, who decided not to seek reelection in 2018 after his very public break with Trump.

Flake's endorsement of Biden was viewed as influential among his fellow Mormons, whose numbers top 400,000 in Arizona and make up a large portion of Arizona's conservative movement.

There were also a number of stark policy differences that steadily emerged between the Republican Party of Donald Trump and the Republican Party of John McCain.

Concerns about health care -- and specifically Trump's handling of coronavirus — turned senior citizens away from the president, said former GOP U.S. Rep. John Shadegg.

"Republicans in Arizona have often won on the strength of their retirement population," he said. "Senior citizens are more threatened by this disease than the rest of the nation and I think more upset with President Trump and his handling of that matter."

"That's the kind of issue that has a broad impact," he added.

DJ Quinlan, a Democratic consultant, also believes concerns about health care swayed voters who might ordinarily vote for the Republican presidential candidate.

McCain’s vote against repealing the Affordable Care Act in 2018, which was a direct rebuke to Trump, resonated with voters in Arizona, he said. Trump and McSally were both were anti-ACA.

Even former Republican Governor Jan Brewer, not otherwise known for her moderation, chose to expand Medicaid during the Obama years, at a time when other right-leaning states refused to do so.

Meanwhile, Trump’s focus on immigration helped him rally his base but he appeared to face a backlash from both Democrats and Republicans.

Moderates in the business community were turned off by Trump’s work to build a wall, said Democratic Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, who won election in a Tucson-based swing district in 2018 that borders Mexico.

“We don’t want a border wall. I think that has really mobilized people in southern Arizona, especially people with businesses and some interest in trade,” Kirkpatrick said. “I have a good relationship with the trucking industry, and they especially would feel the brunt of a border wall -- they want to be able to transport their vegetables across the border. If they have to wait four hours, they risk losing their haul to spoilage.”

Latinos — spurned a decade ago by S.B. 1070, which required immigrants to carry registration at all times — have been gaining political power in the state in recent years, a movement that accelerated in response to Trump's angry rhetoric. Over the last 10 years, dozens of progressive activist groups have sprung up focused on voter registration and workers' rights, which both Republican and Democratic operatives said helped Biden.

This year, the groups knocked on 1.5 million doors and made 3.5 million phone calls during the election, on top of efforts from the Biden campaign.

Then, even as the coronavirus sowed fears of in-person voting, Trump made a strategic error when he launched his attack on mail-in voting, which has a long tradition in the state and usually favors the GOP. Trump encouraged Republicans to vote in-person, while Biden ran up a large lead during the early vote, which was hard for Trump to overcome on Election Day.

“Part of this ultimately comes down to the fact that the president is a little bit of a victim of his own behavior," said Paul Bentz, a Republican pollster with the consulting firm HighGround. "In Arizona, Republicans have a longstanding history of early voting. They’ve perfected early voting. They’ve been doing this more than 20 years.”

Trump, whose awareness of the importance of winning Arizona was exemplified by his two visits to the state during the last week of his campaign, gave a characteristic dismissal on early Wednesday, saying that "we don't even need it" but a win in Arizona "would be nice" after Fox News called the state for Biden. But soon, other states — Wisconsin, Michigan and, eventually, Pennsylvania — slipped out of the president's grasp, too.

In a close election, any factor can be decisive, from the high Latino turnout to fears of mail-in voting to a backlash against the wall. But many McCain loyalists suggest that Trump's mistreatment of their friend was the last piece of the puzzle.

"I think the president's statements about Mr. McCain hurt him here in Arizona," said Shadegg, a longtime political ally of McCain's.

“Look how close this race was in Arizona," added Woods. "All he had to do was show a modicum of common sense and human decency toward an American hero. He probably would have won.”

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