Author: Sky York Journal

Sky York Journal For over a decade, no enemy has loomed larger to the Roberts Court than voting protections, especially those for minority groups who have historically been kept away from the polls with laws and violence. The Court in recent years has raised tests for discrimination to unreachable heights, required voters to employ their own mapmakers, put the responsibility for fixes in the hands of a Congress it knows won’t act, claimed that racism has all but ended anyway.   The groups that fight voter suppression have, under duress, become agile and creative, digging up old statutes under which to…

Sky York Journal This article first appeared at ProPublica. Several high-ranking federal election officials attended a summit last week at which prominent figures who worked to overturn Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election pressed the president to declare a national emergency to take over this year’s midterms. According to videos, photos and social media posts reviewed by ProPublica, the meeting’s participants included Kurt Olsen, a White House lawyer charged with reinvestigating the 2020 election, and Heather Honey, the Department of Homeland Security official in charge of election integrity. The event was convened by Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security…

Sky York Journal On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that Trump-aligned activists are pitching the president on a draft executive order that would declare an “emergency,” relying on debunked claims of foreign interference in elections, to order a far-right wish list of changes to how elections are run in America. That list is far-reaching. It would attempt to revolutionize elections just as President Trump and his allies search for ways to reduce the ease of voting in the run-up to the midterms later this year. Voting by mail would be banned, as would electronic voting machines. The proposal is unlikely…

Sky York Journal President Trump’s Justice Department is doubling down on its months-long crusade to access sensitive voter information from red and blue states across the country. As it currently stands, the DOJ is suing 30 states — both Republican and Democrat alike — who have refused to succumb to the department’s unprecedented demands for voter roll data.  On Thursday, the DOJ filed lawsuits against five more states, four of them red states, whose officials have refused to comply with the department’s order. This most recent batch of lawsuits target New Jersey, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Utah and Kentucky. Despite these…

Sky York Journal NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE–The Trump DOJ has spent the last several months constructing a narrowly focused narrative that then-acting U.S. Attorney Robert McGuire of Nashville was the sole decider in seeking a human smuggling indictment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia last May while he was still confined in El Salvador, a victim of a wrongful deportation in violation of a immigration judge’s order. So it was no surprise that McGuire was the government’s own key witness today in defense of Abrego Garcia’s vindictive prosecution claim. And if you focused only on what was illuminated by the spotlight the government shone…

Sky York Journal Dr. Casey Means — President Donald Trump’s pick for the surgeon general and a leader in the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement — appeared in front of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee Wednesday morning and refused to unequivocally say that vaccines do not cause autism. When asked by committee Chair Bill Cassidy (R-LA) — who, over the past few months, found himself, on many occasions, in conflict with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his MAHA loyalists — whether vaccines cause autism, Means did not respond directly, instead…

Sky York Journal President Donald Trump’s first official State of the Union back in office was previewed as “long,” and it met expectations. And though it clocked in as the longest ever, listeners will be left wondering what, exactly, warranted that length. The night was a slow plod through Trump’s take on his first year back in office, with vanishingly little grounding in fact, punctuated by moments that Trump clearly enjoyed more than the recitation of policy: introducing various guests, game show style, to laud their accomplishments or detail the horrors that were visited upon them.  Large sections of the…

Sky York Journal Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) has been a central figure in the ongoing efforts to resist President Donald Trump’s mass deportation push in New York City. And, when Trump delivers his State of the Union address on Tuesday evening, Goldman is making sure some of the observers who have been monitoring the masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in court and helping detained immigrants win their release will be in the room.  Goldman has invited Father Fabian Arias of Saint Peter’s Church in Manhattan and Peter Melck Kuttel as his guests for the presidential speech. The pair have…

Sky York Journal This story was originally reported by Mariel Padilla of The 19th. Meet Mariel and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy. Pastor Doug Wilson is a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist who advocates for a patriarchal society where sodomy is criminalized, women submit to their husbands and women lose the right to vote. He also preached at the Pentagon this week after being personally invited by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a member of the pastor’s church network.  Wilson’s presence in the nation’s capital highlights how a fringe conservative evangelical Christian belief system has gained more…

Sky York Journal Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) has never quite fit in with the ever-growing contingent of MAGA lawmakers on Capitol Hill who show blind loyalty to the president. He is one of the few Senate Republicans who have publicly and repeatedly criticized President Donald Trump for his actions, though he has not always backed up that criticism with votes. But in one career-defining case, he did. He was one of seven Republicans — ultimately not enough — who voted to convict Trump during his second impeachment trial following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.  At the time of…