“I share the Governor’s concerns about the safety and well-being of all Minnesotans. I also have grave concerns about his statewide ‘Stay-at-Home’ order, and the consequences for families when their jobs and businesses that provide their livelihood are lost”

Gazelka said Senate Republicans would "prefer to work with the governor within the legislative process where we can facilitate testimony, oversight, and ultimately, approval of his actions."

“I do not approve of the Governor’s unilateral decision to continue the order to shelter at home until May 4th,” Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka tweeted Thursday. “We have to get on with our lives.”

Many have regarded McConnell’s support for Trump as a stroke of cynical political genius. McConnell has seemed to be both protecting his caucus and covering his flank in Kentucky—a deep-red state where, perhaps not coincidentally, Trump is far more popular than he is. When the pandemic took hold, the president’s standing initially rose in national polls, and McConnell and Trump will surely both take credit for the aid package in the coming months. Yet, as COVID-19 decimates the economy and kills Americans across the nation, McConnell’s alliance with Trump is looking riskier. Indeed, some critics argue that McConnell bears a singular responsibility for the country’s predicament. They say that he knew from the start that Trump was unequipped to lead in a crisis, but, because the President was beloved by the Republican base, McConnell protected him. He even went so far as to prohibit witnesses at the impeachment trial, thus guaranteeing that the president would remain in office. David Hawpe, the former editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, said of McConnell, “There are a lot of people disappointed in him. He could have mobilized the Senate. But the Republican Party changed underneath him, and he wanted to remain in power.”

John David Dyche, a lawyer in Louisville and until recently a conservative columnist, enjoyed unmatched access to McConnell and his papers, and published an admiring biography of him in 2009. In March, though, Dyche posted a Twitter thread that caused a lot of talk in the state’s political circles. He wrote that McConnell “of course realizes that Trump is a hideous human being & utterly unfit to be president,” and that, in standing by Trump anyway, he has shown that he has “no ideology except his own political power.” Dyche declined to comment for this article, but, after the coronavirus shut down most of America, he announced that he was contributing to McConnell’s opponent, Amy McGrath, and tweeted, “Those who stick with the hideous, incompetent demagogue endanger the country & will be remembered in history as shameful cowards.”

McConnell’s political fealty to Trump has cost him the respect of some of the people who have known him the longest. David Jones, the late co-founder of the health-care giant Humana, backed all McConnell’s Senate campaigns, starting in 1984; Jones and his company’s foundation collectively gave $4.6 million to the McConnell Center. When Jones died, last September, McConnell described him as, “without exaggeration, the single most influential friend and mentor I’ve had in my entire career.” But, three days before Jones’s death, Jones and his two sons, David, Jr., and Matthew, sent the second of two scorching letters to McConnell, both of which were shared with me. They called on him not to be “a bystander” and to use his “constitutional authority to protect the nation from President Trump’s incoherent and incomprehensible international actions.” They argued that “the powers of the Senate to constrain an errant President are prodigious, and it is your job to put them to use.” McConnell had assured them, in response to their first letter, that Trump had “one of the finest national-security teams with whom I have had the honor of working.” But in the second letter the Joneses replied that half of that team had since gone, leaving the Department of Defense “leaderless for months,” and the office of the director of National Intelligence with only an “ ‘acting’ caretaker.” The Joneses noted that they had all served the country: the father in the Navy, Matthew in the Marine Corps, and David, Jr., in the State Department, as a lawyer. Imploring McConnell “to lead,” they questioned the value of “having chosen the judges for a republic while allowing its constitutional structures to fail and its strength and security to crumble.”

John David Dyche, a lawyer in Louisville and until recently a conservative columnist, enjoyed unmatched access to McConnell and his papers, and published an admiring biography of him in 2009. In March, though, Dyche posted a Twitter thread that caused a lot of talk in the state’s political circles. He wrote that McConnell “of course realizes that Trump is a hideous human being & utterly unfit to be president,” and that, in standing by Trump anyway, he has shown that he has “no ideology except his own political power.” Dyche declined to comment for this article, but, after the coronavirus shut down most of America, he announced that he was contributing to McConnell’s opponent, Amy McGrath, and tweeted, “Those who stick with the hideous, incompetent demagogue endanger the country & will be remembered in history as shameful cowards.”

McConnell also appears to have lost the political support of his three daughters. The youngest, Porter, is a progressive activist who is the campaign director for Take On Wall Street, a coalition of labor unions and nonprofit groups which advocates against the “predatory economic power” of “banks and billionaires.” One of its targets has been Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman and C.E.O. of the Blackstone Group, who, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, has, since 2016, donated nearly thirty million dollars to campaigns and super pacs aligned with McConnell. Last year, Take On Wall Street condemned Blackstone’s “detrimental behavior” and argued that the company’s campaign donations “cast a pall on candidates’ ethics.”

Porter McConnell has also publicly criticized the Senate’s confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh, which her father considers one of his greatest achievements. On Twitter, she accused Kavanaugh’s supporters of misogyny, and retweeted a post from StandWithBlaseyFord, a Web site supporting Christine Blasey Ford, one of Kavanaugh’s accusers. The husband of McConnell’s middle daughter, Claire, has also criticized Kavanaugh online, and McConnell’s eldest daughter, Eleanor, is a registered Democrat.

All three daughters declined to comment, as did their mother, Sherrill Redmon, whom McConnell divorced in 1980. After the marriage ended, Redmon, who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy, left Kentucky and took over a women’s-history archive at Smith College, in Massachusetts, where she collaborated with Gloria Steinem on the Voices of Feminism Oral History Project. In an e-mail, Steinem told me that Redmon rarely spoke about McConnell, and noted, “Despite Sherrill’s devotion to recording all of women’s lives, she didn’t talk about the earlier part of her own.” Steinem’s understanding was that McConnell’s political views had once been different. “I can only imagine how painful it must be to marry and have children with a democratic Jekyll and see him turn into a corrupt and authoritarian Hyde,” she wrote. (Redmon is evidently working on a tell-all memoir.)

Millions are pouring into the Kentucky Senate race as small donors throw cash at former Marine Amy McGrath in her probable challenge to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

McGrath outraised McConnell in the first quarter of this year, reporting she received $12.8 million while the Republican incumbent raised $7.8 million. She now edges out McConnell in total fundraising, bringing in nearly $30 million to his $25.6 million. The Senate majority leader is projected to win the seat but by a narrow margin, according to polling data analyzed by FiveThirtyEight.

McGrath is attracting small donors from both in and out of state, making up 63 percent of her fundraising total through the end of 2019. Small donors make up just 16 percent of McConnell’s funds, totaling nearly $2.8 million as he relies more on PACs and his colleagues’ campaign coffers.

Banking on Democrats’ dislike for McConnell, McGrath has also issued several Facebook ads targeting the incumbent senator’s handling of the Coronavirus outbreak.

“It’s a high profile race, McConnell is the second most powerful Republican and Democrats intensely dislike him,” said Raymond La Raja, a political science professor at University of Massachusetts-Amherst. “It is a national race that attracts small donors.”

Dear Mr. President:

Folks talk about the president being in a bubble–that every president loses a sense of reality because of the enormity of the task, and so you are surrounded by aides and politicians who believe their job is to shield their boss from undue pressures. The boss can’t afford to make mistakes because he (or she) is the paramount leader, and the final protector of the principle of government,



So I am wondering if you know any of the people. I am wondering how it came to be that you don’t seem to feel anything that normal people feel. Perhaps your father or mother beat you? Maybe not with an electric cord, but with words and demands which may have shamed you so deeply and driven you so far back into your small Ego chamber or your dark Id cave that you have never been able to find your way to escape into the light that ordinary people see. You must have tried often, and failed every time. I wonder if that’s why you can now only envision yourself as a monster like Grendel, Godzilla, Nosferatu, Josef Stalin, a rapist or a drug-dealer pushing the untested drug for the new virus that you have invested in which you push in your television ad show for yourself. Could this be true? That you can only see yourself as one of the ‘bad people’ that you now project outward onto us, the real people.

I am sorry for you. I sympathize. Your life is awful. Very sad. You are a little boy playing at being a big villain. But it doesn’t seem to help you feel better. You are the most unhappy man I’ve ever seen.

I’m curious–did you have the natural feelings of empathy that the rest of us have, beaten out of you, so now you must inflict punishment on everyone else–especially those you can dominate in your mind–the ones who have little recourse against your fury? Do you realize that you are a bully? Do you know that bullies are basically cowards who dominate those who will allow it? We people out here see a huge number of your victims–the entire Republican Party has fallen beneath your heel–and you seem to really like that. It is very sad.

Do you ever dream? Do your dreams consist of a desire to have everyone on earth bow down to you–to kneel and kiss your hand like the old mob bosses and the tyrants of old? Have you ever felt anything but the raging urge to hurt and dominate? Your poor son Baron looks so deeply sad and disassociated when you bring him out in one of your shows. Your wife seems to be either beaten down to her round heels or to be planning a great revenge on you. Is this possible?

I write sincerely to ask these questions because I feel for you. I have empathy and I know its value to humanity. A person with empathy for others sees how deeply miserable you are–even as you try endlessly to divert yourself by dominating others. You cannot win this sad battle against your own ‘Better Nature,’ as Abraham Lincoln described the force for good that will re-unite this country after you are gone. I hope the people don’t arise and hang you upside down like Mussolini–he too, believed himself to be invincible. All tyrants end the same way–in misery. That is your destiny, Mr. President.

The people see all that you are doing to destroy the country that belongs to us. There are so many, many, many things you and your captive minions have done and are doing to change the people into your servants, slaves, even. The people can only tolerate the theft of their freedom for so long–but finally, as in our original Revolution, they will gather en masse to remove you and every one of your party from any position of power ever again.

This is the Easter season, The Passover season. Both celebrate escape from tyranny–from death itself. We, the people. are marking time from this date till the peaceful New American Revolution says a final goodbye to you. It will be such a grand relief to get rid of you. I write in sorrow that you have not learned humanity–you haven’t learned Faith, Hope or Charity–which is Love. I know that if you had ever had any, you would know what those words mean.

Perhaps after you see how happy America will be without you, you will understand. I hope so. No one should have to live in your dark lonely soul ever again.

With love,
Laurence Luckinbill

"There is nothing partisan about striving to live up to the promise of our country; making the democracy we all cherish more accessible; and protecting our neighbors, friends and loved ones as they participate in this cornerstone of American life,” the former first lady said in a statement provided to Axios.

The legislation was introduced by Reps. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), Suzan DelBene (D-WA) and Jamie Raskin (D-MD) in the House and Sen. Ron Wyden in the Senate.

The Obamas were staying mostly on the sidelines of the 2020 election through the Democratic primary season, but they spoke out against the Wisconsin Supreme Court decision preventing the state's voting deadline from being extended.

"It was just deeply, profoundly concerning," Jarrett said.
"Our goal is to just try to make sure we maximize the number of citizens who can participate in that most fundamental and important responsibility."
The group will encourage people to call or email members of Congress in support of expanded access to vote-by-mail.

On Sunday, President Donald Trump retweeted a call to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci to his 76.8 million followers.

The tweet was in response to Dr. Fauci telling CNN earlier in the day that "no one is going to deny" that lives could have been saved if the US implemented containment measures earlier on in the novel coronavirus outbreak.

It comes one week after Trump stopped Dr. Fauci from weighing in on what he thought about using hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug, on patients with COVID-19.

It's not clear whether it's more than a threat, but Trump has fired several prominent public servants over the last few weeks.