February, 15 2023, 01:01pm EDT
As Nikki Haley Holds Her First Presidential Campaign Event Today, Here’s What You Need To Know About Her Record on Democracy.
Yesterday, former U.N. Ambassador and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley announced she will run for president in 2024. Haley is the first major challenger to Trump for the Republican nomination and has positioned herself as a moderate alternative to the former president and his MAGA extremist understudy, Ron DeSantis. Nothing is further from the truth. In her time as the Governor of South Carolina, Haley was vocal about her opposition to reproductive health care and gun safety measures, and her abysmal record on voting rights and protecting our democracy makes her particularly dangerous as the 2024 election approaches.
More information on Nikki Haley’s democracy lowlights:
- In 2011, Nikki Haley was one of the architects of a voter ID law making it harder for people to vote. The law was initially blocked by a court, but eventually took effect in 2013. At the time, over 178,000 of the state’s registered voters did not possess a valid form of ID, and since then confusion over the law has been reported to have discouraged even voters with qualifying IDs from voting. African-Americans accounted for about 30 percent of voters without valid ID according to the South Carolina chapter of the ACLU.
- Haley has been vocal in her opposition to the “For the People Act,” legislation that would have expanded voting rights, protected voters from state voter suppression laws, and ensured that every eligible American can participate in our country’s democracy.
- Haley was a vocal supporter of Georgia’s 2021 legislation that criminalizes distributing food and water to voters waiting in line, moves ballot drop boxes to more inconvenient locations, and requires a photo ID for mail-in votes. Haley also spoke out against corporations that condemned Georgia’s anti-voter laws and encouraged her followers to boycott those companies.
- Haley has publicly supported the Republican State Leadership Committee’s (RSLC) Commission on Election Integrity, a body formed in 2021 and used to oppose federal voting rights legislation. The Commission is co-chaired by Tre Hargett, the Secretary of State in Tennessee, who opposed efforts in 2020 to allow voters afraid of COVID-19 to cast absentee ballots by mail.
- In the 2022 midterm election, Haley endorsed and campaigned on behalf of election deniers such as Hershel Walker, Mehmet Oz, and Marco Rubio. She also campaigned with Adam Laxalt of Nevada, who led the Trump campaign’s efforts to overturn the results in that state, and endorsed Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, who worked to keep Trump in office after the election, according to text messages obtained by the Jan. 6 committee.
- Since announcing, Haley’s first major campaign endorsement has come from Ralph Norman, a South Carolina congressman. Norman was one of the many election denier, MAGA Republicans to vote against certifying the 2020 election.
Despite yesterday’s announcement, Haley has always been a strong ally of Donald Trump and a January 6 apologist.
More information about Nikki Haley’s allegiance to Donald Trump:
- In 2016, Haley said she wouldn’t be backing Trump and saying he is “everything a governor doesn’t want in a president,” Less than a year later, she was serving in his Administration and defending him at every turn.
- While Haley initially criticized Trump for inciting the mob on January 6, she opposed impeachment, saying just weeks after the attack “they beat him up before he got into office. They’re beating him up after he leaves office. I mean at some point, I mean, give the man a break. I mean, move on.”
- In October 2021, Haley told the Wall Street Journal that “[Trump] has a strong legacy from his administration. He has the ability to get strong people elected, and he has the ability to move the ball, and I hope that he continues to do that. We need him in the Republican Party. I don’t want us to go back to the days before Trump.”
- In December 2022, Haley defended Trump from criticism, telling Politico’s Tim Alberta “I understand the president. I understand that genuinely, to his core, he believes he was wronged. This is not him making it up.” Throughout the interview, she refused to hold Trump accountable.
Stand Up America was founded in 2016 as a digital-first grassroots community working to resist Donald Trump and his cronies’ corruption, racism, and his threats to our democracy. From 2017 to 2021, our members made 1.7 million calls to Congress to oppose the MAGA extremist agenda. In 2020, our volunteers contacted 25 million voters to help defeat Trump and elect Joe Biden to the presidency. In 2022, our team helped build a firewall for democracy ahead of 2024 by electing pro-democracy Secretaries of State in Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, and Nevada, passing key democracy ballot initiatives, and mobilizing our members to get out the vote for progressive candidates nationwide. In 2024, our community will continue mobilizing to elect candidates who will stand up for our freedoms and our democracy.
Stand Up America is a progressive advocacy organization with over two million community members across the country. Focused on grassroots advocacy to strengthen our democracy and oppose Trump's corrupt agenda, Stand Up America has driven over 600,000 phone calls to Congress and mobilized tens of thousands of protestors across the country.
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US House Committee on the Budget Ranking Member Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), who is part of the New Democrat Coalition, said: "I welcome this op-ed by Mitt Romney and encourage people to read it. As the next chair of the House Budget Committee, increasing revenue by closing loopholes exploited by the wealthiest Americans will be a top priority."
Progressive Saikat Chakrabarti, who is reportedly worth at least $167 million and is one of the candidates running to replace retiring former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), responded: "Even Mitt Romney now agrees that we need to tax the wealthiest. I call for a wealth tax on our billionaires and centimillionaires."
Michael Linden, a senior policy fellow at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, said: "Kudos to Mitt Romney for changing his mind and calling for higher taxes on the rich. I'm not going to nitpick his op-ed (though there are a few things I disagree with), because the gist of it is right: We need real tax reform to make the rich pay more."
Others pointed to Romney's record, including the impactful 47% remarks. The Lever's David Sirota wondered, "Why is it that powerful people typically wait until they have no power to take the right position and effectively admit they were wrong when they had more power to do something about it?"
According to Sirota:
The obvious news of the op-ed is that we've reached a point in which even American politics' very own Gordon Gekko—a private equity mogul-turned-Republican politician—is now admitting the tax system has been rigged for his fellow oligarchs.
And, hey, that's good. I believe in the politics of addition. I believe in welcoming converts to good causes in the spirit of "better late than never." I believe there should be space for people to change their views for the better. And I appreciate Romney offering at least some pro forma explanation about what allegedly changed his thinking (sidenote: I say "allegedly" because it's not like Romney only just now learned that the tax system was rigged—he was literally a co-founder of Bain Capital!).
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Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, made his comments on his social media app X, in response to billionaire investor Ray Dalio, who'd announced that he and his wife were contributing to an initiative backed by the Trump administration to create savings accounts for children born between 2025 and 2028.
Dalio mentioned that the computer billionaire Michael Dell and his wife had also pledged $6.25 billion to the effort.
Unprompted, Musk responded: "It is certainly a nice gesture of the Dells, but there will be no poverty in the future, and so no need to save money. There will be universal high income."
It's a theory that Musk has proposed repeatedly of late. Last month, while on a podcast, he suggested that thanks to rapidly accelerating AI and robot technology, all labor will soon be automated, making the need for wages obsolete: "In less than 20 years, working will be optional. Working at all will be optional. Like a hobby."
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"I was delighted to hear that through the rapid advancement in artificial intelligence and robotics that you are funding, you will be bringing about utopia to the world," the senator said. "You have told us that poverty will be wiped out, work will be optional, there will be universal high income, and that everyone will have the best medical care, food, home, transport, and everything else. That is wonderful news."
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The US Department of Justice on Friday released a massive—but incomplete—trove containing hundreds of thousands of records related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a move that came as Democratic lawmakers vowed to pursue "all legal options" after the Trump administration blew a deadline to disclose all of the files.
The DOJ uploaded the files—which can be viewed here in the section titled "Epstein Files Transparency Act"—to its website on Friday. Earlier in the day, Deputy US Attorney General Todd Blanche said that the agency would not release all the Epstein files on Friday, as required by the transparency law signed last month by President Donald Trump.
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Curiously, a search for the words "Trump" and "Epstein" in the posted documents returned no results.
The progressive media site MeidasTouch said, "This Epstein files 'release' is the most disgusting cover up in American history."
Journalist Aaron Parnas accused the DOJ of "engaging in a cover up."
"Most of the files are heavily redacted, with very few fully released," he noted. "There are disturbing images of Epstein with victims. There are images of Michael Jackson, Bill Clinton, and others. Donald Trump is not in any of the ones I've reviewed."
While not accused of any wrongdoing, Trump was a former close friend of Epstein, who faced federal sex trafficking charges at the time of his suspicious 2019 death in a New York City jail cell.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson released a statement Friday afternoon, which read in part:
The Trump administration is the most transparent in history. By releasing thousands of pages of documents, cooperating with the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena request, and President Trump recently calling for further investigations into Epstein’s Democrat friends, the Trump administration has done more for the victims than Democrats ever have.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) noted in a statement following the DOJ document dump, noting that the Epstein Files Transparency Act passed by Congress and signed by Trump "calls for the complete release of the Epstein files so that there can be full transparency."
"This set of heavily redacted documents released by the Department of Justice today is just a fraction of the whole body of evidence," Schumer continued. “Simply releasing a mountain of blacked out pages violates the spirit of transparency and the letter of the law. For example, all 119 pages of one document were completely blacked out. We need answers as to why."
“Senate Democrats are working to assess the documents that have been released to determine what actions must be taken to hold the Trump administration accountable," he added. "We will pursue every option to make sure the truth comes out.”
Schumer's remarks followed vows by congressional Democrats including Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.)—who, along with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) introduced the Epstein Files Transparency Act—to hold Trump administration officials accountable for violating the law.
Responding to the DOJ's document release and delay in fully disclosing the files, Elisa Batista, campaign director at UltraViolet Action, said in a statement that “if the Trump administration had its way, they would undo the sacrifice of survivors who came forward to demand transparency and accountability, as well as all those abused by Epstein who were unable to."
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Britt Jacovich, a spokesperson for the progressive political action group MoveOn, said following Friday's release that “President Trump’s Department of Justice is breaking the law by holding all of the Epstein files hostage, and yet again, Trump is doing absolutely nothing."
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Yasmine Meyer, an attorney who represents multiple alleged victims of Epstein, told CBS News that while "we are glad that... we are seeing some documents finally being released," the "heavy redactions" in many of the documents are "troubling."
"Every single time that there has been a promise to deliver some meaningful material, the survivors cannot help but get their hopes up... and every single time, that door slams back shut in their faces and retraumatized them all over again," she added.
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