The Daily 202: Supreme Court hearing offers pre-election tests for Lindsey Graham and other vulnerable senators

Graham finds himself in a toss-up race with Harrison in a state that President Trump carried by 14 points. He believes, for understandable reasons, that overseeing the confirmation hearing of Judge Amy Coney Barrett that kicked off Monday morning will boost his standing at home. After all, no Democrat has won a Senate race in the Palmetto State since Fritz Hollings won his final term in 1998. Hollings, who died last year at 97, had first been elected to statewide office in 1954. During a debate last weekend, Graham pivoted on every question to talk more about the Supreme Court.

“The parade of horribles that come if we lose the House, the Senate and the White House is unbelievable,” Graham warned Sunday on Fox News. In another Fox appearance to preview the hearing, Graham said: “We are about to go into the Super Bowl of politics.”

Traditionally, Supreme Court vacancies benefit down-ballot Republicans more than Democrats. That certainly was the case in 2016. But the fundraising numbers Harrison announced on Sunday and fresh polling released on Monday morning offer new indications that the reverse might be true as it relates to the GOP hopes of holding their three-seat majority. Confirming Barrett could hurt vulnerable GOP incumbents up for reelection just three weeks from now in competitive swing states like North Carolina, Iowa and Maine.

Money alone does not win Senate races. The quarterly fundraising record Harrison just broke was previously held by Beto O’Rourke, who raised $38.1 million in the same period for his 2018 bid to oust Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), another incumbent in a red state who is loathed by the left. Nevertheless, Cruz prevailed by three points.

But Cruz, a member of the committee considering Barrett’s nomination, is warning that next month’s election “could be a bloodbath of Watergate proportions” if “terrible” trendlines continue, referring to the party’s steep losses in the 1974 midterms after Richard Nixon’s resignation. “If on Election Day, people are angry and they’ve given up hope and they’re depressed,” Cruz said Friday on CNBC, “I think we could lose the White House and both houses of Congress.”

Trump put Cruz, the runner-up for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016, on his list of potential picks for future Supreme Court vacancies the week before Ginsburg died. But Cruz demurred. The senator has said he wants to run for president again in 2024.

Fresh Washington Post-ABC News polling shows that 44 percent of registered voters say the Senate should hold hearings and vote on Barrett’s nomination, while 52 percent say filling this seat should be left to the winner of the presidential election and a Senate vote next year. Support for leaving the decision to the next president is down from 57 percent in a Post-ABC poll last month, which was conducted before Trump announced Barrett at a Rose Garden ceremony that appears to have become a superspreader event for the coronavirus.

Two of the GOP senators who attended the Rose Garden ceremony, and sit on the Judiciary Committee, subsequently tested positive for covid-19: Mike Lee of Utah and Thom Tillis of North Carolina. Both say they still plan to participate in the hearings. 

Tillis, in a neck-and-neck race for a second term, has strongly supported confirming Barrett, but he may distance himself slightly from Trump. “The best check on a Biden presidency is for Republicans to have a majority in the Senate. And I do think ‘checks and balances’ does resonate with North Carolina voters,” the senator told Politico last Thursday.

During the 2018 confirmation hearing for now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Republicans had no women on the committee. This was so problematic after professor Christine Blasey Ford accused the nominee of sexual assault that the GOP literally hired a female prosecutor from Arizona to come to Washington to question Ford and try to poke holes in her story. Republican leadership put Sens. Joni Ernst of Iowa and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee on the committee last year.

Now Ernst is in a neck-and-neck reelection fight, and she’s been on the defensive over abortion and health care since Trump nominated Barrett. Barrett signed her name to a newspaper ad in 2006 that that denounced the “barbaric legacy” of the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade and called for it to be overturned. She was an active member of Faculty for Life as a law professor at Notre Dame. In a news dump this past Friday night, she turned over additional evidence, including an ad that she signed onto in which she reaffirmed her opposition to abortion. Ernst, who has been strenuously antiabortion in the past, is now insisting that she has no idea how Barrett might rule on Roe, and she has started claiming that the precedent is probably safe.

The Post-ABC poll, released this morning, shows only 24 percent of registered voters say Roe v. Wade should be overturned, while 62 percent say the Supreme Court should uphold the decision that guarantees a woman’s right to abortion and a sizable 14 percent have no opinion. 

“The Post-ABC poll finds 81 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of independent voters say the court should uphold its decision in Roe,” Scott Clement and Emily Guskin report. “Republicans are roughly divided, with 40 percent saying it should be upheld while 44 percent say it should be overturned. Support for overturning the decision reaches a majority only among Republicans and Republican-leaning voters who identify as ‘very conservative’ (57 percent) or among White evangelical Protestant Republicans (51 percent). 

“White evangelical Protestants overall – not just those who lean Republican – are split, with 44 percent saying Roe should be overturned and 41 percent saying it should be upheld. A 60 percent majority of Catholics and 62 percent of White Catholics say Roe should be upheld, while fewer than 3 in 10 of either group say it should be overturned. Support for upholding the ruling rises to 73 percent among White mainline Protestants and 75 percent of voters who do not affiliate with any religious group.”

Monday should stay mostly devoid of fireworks. All 22 senators on the committee are giving 10-minute opening statements. Barrett will be introduced sometime in the mid-afternoon by Indiana’s two GOP senators and a former dean of Notre Dame’s law school. Then she will deliver her opening statement, but Republicans released the text on Sunday, so that part will be anticlimactic.

In her introductory remarks to the committee, Barrett will reminisce about when she clerked for Scalia. “I felt like I knew the justice before I ever met him because I had read so many of his colorful, accessible opinions,” Barrett plans to say. “More than the style of his writing, though, it was the content of Justice Scalia’s reasoning that shaped me. His judicial philosophy was straightforward: A judge must apply the law as written, not as the judge wishes it were. Sometimes that approach meant reaching results that he did not like. … Justice Scalia taught me more than just law. He was devoted to his family, resolute in his beliefs and fearless of criticism. And as I embarked on my own legal career, I resolved to maintain that same perspective.”

Barrett, just 48, will note that she was 9 when President Ronald Reagan nominated Sandra Day O’Connor to be the first woman on the Supreme Court and 21 when President Bill Clinton picked Ginsburg. “I have been nominated to fill Justice Ginsburg’s seat, but no one will ever take her place,” the nominee plans to say. “I would be the first mother of school-age children to serve on the court. … And I would be the only sitting justice who didn’t attend law school at Harvard or Yale. I am confident that Notre Dame will hold its own, and maybe I could even teach them a thing or two about football.”

Tuesday and Wednesday will be the most important days of the four-day hearing. Each of the 22 senators will get 30 minutes to question Barrett during the first round on Tuesday. They will get a second round of questions on Wednesday. Barrett, confirmed to the Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in 2017, has been practicing for the questions during what is known in legal circles as a murder board. A team of lawyers from the Justice Department, along with White House counsel Pat Cipollone and deputy counsel Kate Comerford Todd, have been grilling her during mock hearings with the questions they expect she’ll get from Democrats.

Thursday is set aside for testimony from outside witnesses. Republican witnesses will say Barrett is brilliant and incredible. Democratic witnesses will say she is too biased to serve impartially and criticize the process for confirming her. Do not expect anything revelatory or surprising from these witnesses.

The Democrat everyone will be watching is Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.). The vice-presidential nominee is not campaigning this week so she can focus on the confirmation hearing. But a spokesman said that she will not come to the hearing room. Instead, she will appear virtually from her Senate office. Her spokesman said it is because Graham and Republicans refuse to take “common-sense steps” to protect members and other participants from the coronavirus.

Democrats hope this week gives them a chance to increase the saliency of health care, which could perpetuate what polls show is an historic gender gap. “Democratic senators will have a much tighter focus, each drilling Barrett with questions about the legality of the Affordable Care Act and telling stories of constituents who have benefited from President Barack Obama’s signature health-care law,” Seung Min Kim reports. “Democratic senators on the committee have held at least four conference calls in the past week to fine-tune their Barrett strategy … With their strategy, Democrats also hope to exploit divisions among the dozen Republican senators who sit on the committee, who have diverging views and political imperatives on how they are positioning themselves on health care.”

While Tillis and Ernst insist that they want to protect insurance coverage for people with preexisting medical conditions, other Republican senators like Lee say the whole law is unconstitutional and must be thrown out. Lee also opposed Trump’s proposal to spend $1.8 trillion on economic relief before the election. He complained on a conference call Saturday with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that a coronavirus deal before the election could complicate floor timing as the Senate tries to fill the Supreme Court vacancy this month, and hurt Republicans at the ballot box because the Supreme Court fight would no longer be front and center.

Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), who will introduce Barrett to the Senate this afternoon, suggested in a Sunday op-ed for the Indianapolis Star that she won’t strike down the health-care law because she is the mom to seven children, including a son with special needs. “As the head of a large household, Judge Barrett knows full well, and better than most of her detractors, how important medical coverage is to every American’s health. This includes coverage for those with pre-existing conditions,” Young wrote. 

How many kids a judge has is irrelevant and immaterial to how they will rule. Scalia, her mentor, had nine children. He voted twice to throw out the ACA in its entirety.

Watch for Republicans to take umbrage at Democratic efforts to highlight Barrett’s opposition to abortion. GOP senators will seek to spin criticisms of Barrett’s long paper trail of antiabortion views as somehow attacks on her faith. Democrats on the committee say that’s hooey and said they will not impugn her faith. “I am totally focused on what this nominee sitting there as a justice is going to do in striking down the Affordable Care Act,” Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) said Sunday on CNN. “That’s what I’m focused on.” 

• E.J. Dionne: “The GOP is lying its way toward expanding the Supreme Court’s conservative majority.”
• Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.): “A Justice Barrett must recuse herself from deciding the future of the president who picked her.”
• Jim Obergefell, the plaintiff in Obergefell v. Hodges, and Alphonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign: “Barrett’s confirmation would be an LGBTQ rights emergency.” 
• Jen Rubin: “Republicans, it’s a little late to start distancing.” 
• Adam White: “Barrett’s confirmation may be certain, but these Senate hearings are invaluable.”

Nearly 300,000 new cases and 4,500 deaths were reported in the seven days that ended Saturday. The seven-day rolling average for new cases reached new highs in Alaska, Colorado, Indiana, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota and Wisconsin. Nationwide, the number of new cases being reported each day has been slowly climbing since mid-September. At least 214,000 people have died of the coronavirus in the United States since February. More than 7,728,000 case have been reported. (Antonia Farzan and Jacqueline Dupree)

“This ad tries to argue that [Trump] took forceful action against the coronavirus, despite his constant efforts to play down the pandemic in public,” Glenn Kessler reports in a fact check. “After the ad asserts, ‘President Trump tackled the virus head on as leaders should,’ it follows with a clip of Fauci appearing to endorse that claim: ‘I can’t imagine that anybody could be doing more.’ … Fauci was not talking about Trump at all. … The ad misleadingly clips Fauci’s comment and takes it out of context.” 

Fauci told CNN: “In my nearly five decades of public service, I have never publicly endorsed any political candidate. The comments attributed to me without my permission in the GOP campaign ad were taken out of context from a broad statement I made months ago about the efforts of federal public health officials.”

“Politics has thoroughly contaminated the scientific process. The result has been an epidemic of distrust,” Joel Achenbach and Laurie McGinley report. “The White House has repeatedly meddled with decisions by career professionals at the FDA, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other science-based agencies. Many of the nation’s leading scientists, including some of the top doctors in the administration, are deeply disturbed by the collision of politics and science and bemoan its effects on public health. ‘I’ve never seen anything that closely resembles this. It’s like a pressure cooker,’ said Fauci in an interview … Fauci and [NIH director Francis Collins] have reason to worry: Polls show trust in a potential vaccine has plunged. A Pew Research poll in September found that only 21 percent of respondents said they would definitely get a coronavirus vaccine if it were available immediately, down from 42 percent in May.”

“Trump tweeted on Sunday that he is ‘immune’ to the coronavirus and ‘can’t give it,’ even though the White House has not released any negative test results and immunity to the virus remains poorly understood,” Karin Brulliard and Felicia Sonmez report. “The tweet was quickly flagged by Twitter, which said it contained ‘misleading and potentially harmful misinformation’ … It was the latest example of the social media giant pushing back against the president’s posts on the deadly virus … Some recovered patients with covid-19 … have been reinfected, and experts say many questions remain about immunity, including how long it lasts. … Trump’s claim came one day after his physician said he is ‘no longer considered a transmission risk to others,’ in a memo that seemed to clear Trump to return to his normal activities a little more than a week after he announced he had tested positive for the coronavirus. Trump is expected to hold a campaign rally today in Florida.”

The president’s aides are “pushing for immediate action on a narrow measure after the administration’s $1.8 trillion proposal was rebuffed by members of both parties,” Jeff Stein and Erica Werner report. “In a letter to Congress sent Sunday, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin asked lawmakers to first pass legislation allowing the Trump administration to redirect about $130 billion in unused funding from the Paycheck Protection Program intended for small businesses while negotiations continue on a broader relief effort. The administration’s latest request is unlikely to advance in the House, where Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has rejected stand-alone legislation in favor of a comprehensive package … Pelosi has in particular demanded that the Trump administration adopt Democrats’ plan for robust testing and tracing. … Lawmakers in both parties support an extension of the Paycheck Protection Program. More than a dozen moderate Democrats in the House have indicated support for a GOP-led procedural move that could force a floor vote on a stand-alone PPP bill, but it is not clear if the effort will secure enough support to require a vote on the House floor.”

• A new House report criticizes the Treasury Department’s handling of the Payroll Support Program, saying that avoidable delays in allocating $3 billion for aviation contractors may have resulted in the layoffs and furloughs of more than 16,500 people at 15 companies. (Lori Aratani)
• Cybercriminals have pocketed an estimated $8 billion meant for people forced out of work because of the pandemic, as states struggle to combat massive fraud in unemployment relief programs. The Secret Service and the Labor Department have warned about such criminal networks, but the overburdened and antiquated systems that send checks have been unable to stop it. (Politico)
• Stanford University professors Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics for their work on auction theory. (David Lynch)

“Faced with the prospect of mass layoffs coinciding with a second wave of the novel coronavirus and new lockdowns, European leaders are extending their commitment to generous, budget-busting efforts to keep workers paid and employed. The latest country to fall in line is Britain, which on Friday backed away from ending a government program that pays up to 80 percent of private-sector salaries for workers furloughed because of the pandemic. Instead, the British Treasury will continue to subsidize wages for businesses told to close under the growing number of regional lockdowns,” Michael Birnbaum, William Booth and Luisa Beck report. “The basic model of the European programs, sometimes called short-time work, is that struggling employers can place their workers on either full or partial furloughs, while the government takes over most of the cost of their idled time … 

“The programs have been credited with cushioning the shock of the pandemic. While the U.S. unemployment rate skyrocketed from 3.5 percent to 14.7 percent between February and April, … the European Union rate has moved only modestly upward, rising from 6.5 percent in February to 7.4 percent in August … The costs are high. Germany may spend more than $35 billion on the first year of its furlough program … and a year-long extension could cost another $12 billion. A program that expensive, adjusted for the larger size of the U.S. economy, would carry a price tag of around $260 billion.” 

• The Chinese port city Qingdao announced plans to test all 9.5 million residents for the coronavirus after a cluster emerged at a hospital. Twelve positive cases have been identified, half of them asymptomatic, local authorities said. (Eva Dou)
• India surpassed 7 million cases, becoming the only country besides the United States to reach that milestone and putting it on track to soon have the world’s highest tally of infections. The country has been averaging more than 60,000 new cases each day. (Antonia Farzan)
• Brazilians are rushing to volunteer for vaccine trials. More than 150,000 Brazilians have died and over 5 million have been infected, making the country an inviting testing ground in the global race for a vaccine. Four of the leading vaccine candidates are being studied in the country. (Terrence McCoy)
• New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, feted at home as as the “anti-Trump,” is poised to win reelection. Her Labour Party holds a double-digit lead over the conservative National party in surveys. (Emanuel Stoakes)

“Trump’s bet that he could tame China’s rise through a mix of personal charisma and dealmaking prowess has faltered in the fourth year of his presidency,” David Nakamura reports. “Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping … have not spoken since March. Tensions over the coronavirus pandemic have exposed Trump’s claims of friendship with Xi … Trump was on the precipice of declaring victory with his China strategy as recently as January, when he hosted senior Communist Party officials in a White House celebration of a modest trade pact. But the president has since shifted to attacking Beijing as an even greater danger than he suggested in 2016 … Yet Trump’s renewed tough talk has served as a tacit acknowledgment that his vow to bring China to heel has failed, even as he seeks to convince voters that [Biden] is not strong enough to stand up to Xi. … Trump has moved the U.S.-China relationship from one of skeptical cooperation to one of distrust and antagonism, leaving the world’s two major powers at odds on a range of economic and national security issues that are resonating around the globe.” 

• North Korea’s massive, new intercontinental ballistic missile was paraded through the streets of Pyongyang over the weekend, a chilling reminder the regime poses a greater threat to the United States now than when Trump took office. Kim Jong Un has the capacity to strike our homeland. (Simon Denyer)
• The Iran-backed militia Kataib Hezbollah said it agreed to a “conditional” cease-fire against U.S. interests in Iraq on the condition that Washington present a timetable for the withdrawal of American troops. (Louisa Loveluck)
• A Taliban spokesman said the group supports Trump’s reelection in hopes that he will withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan. A Trump spokesman rejected the endorsement. (CBS News)
• Microsoft took legal steps to dismantle the Russian Trickbot botnet, a network of infected computers that Microsoft believes had the potential to be used to lock up voter-registration and election result systems. The company obtained an order from a federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia that gave it control over the botnet, which Microsoft said is run by Russian-speaking criminals. (Jay Greene and Ellen Nakashima)

Intelligence veterans say Trump’s massive debts to unknown entities make him a national security risk and would disqualify him from getting a security clearance if he was not president. “His financial situation presents a significant counterintelligence risk — because the millions of dollars he owes over the next few years put his very financial solvency at risk. If he can’t pay these debts, he may face severe business, political and social consequences,” write Mike Morell, who has twice served as acting CIA director, and David Kris, a former assistant attorney general for national security.

“Peg Bohnert, an Arizona retiree, voted for [Trump] in 2016 because she thought the businessman would transform the White House into ‘a well-run machine.’ Ruth Mierzwa, a Pennsylvania business owner, was turned off by both main contenders and opted for a third-party candidate. Roman Uglehus, a North Carolina college student, has never bothered to cast a ballot. All have decided they will vote for [Biden] this time, choices they say were either made or reinforced in recent weeks as Trump has stumbled through a disastrous stretch,” Griff Witte, Pam Kelley and Christine Spolar report. “In the homestretch of the 2020 campaign, there has been little good news for the incumbent. And that is showing up as an ominous turn for him in the polls as Biden consolidates support. What had been a steady national lead for Biden in the high single digits during the late summer has expanded to 12 points in early October, according to a Post polling average. A Washington Post-ABC News poll released Sunday fits with the trend, putting Biden at 54 percent nationally and Trump at 42 … While key battleground-state polls have shown a somewhat closer contest, the trajectory has been clear. … 

“Four years ago, voters who decided in the presidential campaign’s waning days broke decisively for Trump … But many of those who had been on the fence appear to be coming down on Biden’s side. … Among voters who backed a third-party candidate in 2016, for instance, about half — 49 percent — currently support the Democratic nominee this time around. … Mierzwa, a resident of Pennsylvania’s Luzerne County, is among those who couldn’t bring herself to pull the lever for either major-party candidate in 2016. … [She] ended up voting for the Libertarian nominee … But this year, the registered Republican said she is determined to vote for Biden. It’s a choice, she said, that has become clearer than ever in recent weeks. ‘Trump is just so scary at this point that I don’t think I can waste my vote on a third party,’ she said. ‘It just keeps getting worse. From his pick for the Supreme Court to his racist comments to his degrading anyone who doesn’t agree with him to his handling of the virus. I can go on and on.’”

“The use of the United States Marine Band for a de facto political rally, where guests donned ‘Make America Great Again’ hats and ‘Blexit’ T-shirts — backing a movement that urges Black Americans to exit the Democratic Party — marked another instance of the president pushing the boundaries of U.S. law and the military tradition of political neutrality,” Paul Sonne reports. “The band is called upon when the president is discharging his duties as head of state. But federal regulations bar the use of government resources for, and the coercion of federal employees into, political activities aimed at a candidate’s reelection — and taxpayer-funded military bands cannot be used for campaign events. Members of the U.S. military are prohibited from wearing military uniforms at political campaign events. Administration and military officials said the activity on Saturday was an official White House event called, ‘Peaceful Protest for Law and Order.’”

• Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the military will play “no role” in the presidential election and expressed confidence that any disputes can be worked out peacefully. (NPR)
• Trump’s children brought Secret Service money to the family business with their visits, records show. (Dave Fahrenthold, Josh Partlow and Carol Leonnig)
• After rashly pulling out of it before he consulted with his campaign advisers, Trump is trying to bring back this week’s debate. But the commission and the Biden campaign moved on. Both campaigns are working with separate networks to host dueling town hall events: Biden with ABC, Trump with NBC. (CNN)
• Trump wants to hit the campaign trail every day through the election. His team is in the process of scheduling events to make that happen, Axios reports. Not everyone thinks it’s a good idea, including one adviser who said: “He’s going to kill himself.” After rallying in Florida on Monday, the president plans trips to Pennsylvania on Tuesday and Iowa on Wednesday.
• “In several phone calls last weekend from the presidential suite at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Mr. Trump shared an idea he was considering: When he left the hospital, he wanted to appear frail at first when people saw him,” the Times reported on Saturday. “But underneath his button-down dress shirt, he would wear a Superman T-shirt, which he would reveal as a symbol of strength when he ripped open the top layer. He ultimately did not go ahead with the stunt.”
• Donald Trump Jr., Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) rallied Hispanic voters in Miami on Sunday night with a “Fighters Against Socialism” bus-tour stop. (Miami Herald)
• A dispute over how North Carolina voters should correct problems with their mail ballots remains unresolved, leaving at least 6,800 votes — including more than 3,300 ballots from people of color — in limbo across a key battleground state. (Elise Viebeck)
• GOP voter registration efforts in Pennsylvania have been successful. “Since Election Day 2016, Republicans have shrunk the Democratic advantage in Pennsylvania by nearly 200,000 voters, from just over 916,000 to just over 717,000 — all in a state that Mr. Trump won in 2016 by fewer than 45,000 votes. Many of those gains have been made in smaller, more rural and mostly white counties,” the Times reports.

“As floodwaters from Hurricane Delta receded from this city, the largest in southwestern Louisiana to be severely hit by two hurricanes in six weeks, residents and city officials on Sunday were still surveying the damage of compounding crises,” Dan Lamothe, Meryl Kornfield and Hannah Knowles report. “Power had returned in many neighborhoods and some traffic lights were working again. Some outlying areas were still underwater after a double dose of storm surge from Delta on Friday and Hurricane Laura in August, though water levels had lowered across the city. Statewide, almost half of all power outages stemming from Delta had been restored by Sunday afternoon, officials said, after peaking at nearly 690,000 — more than during Laura. But in a testament to the storms’ lasting devastation, more than 9,000 Louisianans remain in shelters, most of them displaced by Hurricane Laura … 

“With an economy partly reliant on tourism, Lake Charles was already struggling because of the coronavirus pandemic. Now the city and Louisiana have to recover from a punishing storm season, too. … Officials on Sunday announced the first death linked to Delta: an 86-year-old man in St. Martin Parish killed by a generator-sparked fire. At a news conference, Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) urged ‘extreme caution’ in using the devices.”

“Selwyn Jones moved to his wife’s hometown of Gettysburg, S.D., four years ago, bought a motel and settled in for a quiet life in the country. But not long after his nephew, George Floyd, was killed by Minneapolis police in May, Jones found himself an unlikely voice for social justice,” the Star Tribune reports. “Jones led the charge to remove Confederate flag-adorned patches from the uniforms of Gettysburg police. Finding that voice came at a cost. The backlash against Jones, who is Black, was immediate as hundreds of people from the town of 1,162 and elsewhere took to Facebook calling for the flag’s return. They attacked both him and his late nephew, and eventually, the personal jabs evolved into attacks on [BLM] and the broader call for racial equity.”

• A private security guard is being held on suspicion of first-degree murder after a fatal shooting amid dueling demonstrations in downtown Denver — and he was not licensed to work as a guard in the city, officials said. “Police identified the suspect as Matthew Dolloff, 30, and said he was not a protest participant,” Knowles reports. “He was working as security for a local media outlet covering the events, authorities said as their investigation continues. Right-wing demonstrators had gathered Saturday at the city’s civic center for a ‘Patriot’ rally, as did left-wing activists affiliating themselves with Black Lives Matter and antifa, who said they wanted to ‘drown out their hate.’”
• Pennsylvania’s second lady, Gisele Barreto Fetterman, was the victim of a racist attack at a grocery store over the weekend. The Brazil native filmed a woman who called her the “n-word” and said she didn’t “belong here.” Fetterman, who got her citizenship in 2004 after living undocumented for years, said she’s been insulted before, especially because of her background, but never in person. (Jaclyn Peiser)
• A Black man who was led by a rope by two White officers on horseback sued the Texas city of Galveston and its police department for $1 million, saying he suffered humiliation and fear during the arrest. (AP)

Campaign-related vandalism seems to be getting worse in the Trump era:

The Los Angeles Lakers defeated the Miami Heat, 106-93, in Game 6 on Sunday, outlasting the plucky underdogs to claim the 17th NBC championship in franchise history. This is what the scene looked like outside the Staples Center in the City of Angels:

“Saturday Night Live” lamely spoofed the vice-presidential debate in its cold open, with emphasis on the fly: