The Daily 202: Amy Barrett distances herself from Antonin Scalia in confirmation hearing

During her Senate confirmation hearing this week, though, Barrett has repeatedly sought to distinguish, and even distance, herself from Scalia and his most controversial opinions on the high court. “If I’m confirmed, you would not be getting Justice Scalia,” she said several times on Tuesday. “You would be getting Justice Barrett.”

Barrett said she will not “embrace or disavow” any of Scalia’s positions and that “no one should assume” she would follow his lead. “Originalists don’t always agree, and neither do textualists,” she said.

Barrett declined to say whether she agreed with Scalia’s dissent in the 5-4 decision that legalized same-sex marriage in 2015 – or three other high-profile gay rights cases in the years before that. She declined to say whether she agrees with his oft-stated position that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided. She declined to discuss Scalia’s analysis in two worker’s rights cases in which he was on the opposite side of the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose seat Barrett has been nominated to fill.

“Judges can’t just wake up one day and say, ‘I have an agenda. I like guns, I hate guns, I like abortion, I hate abortion,’ and walk in like a royal queen and impose their will on the world,” Barrett said.

If you read between the lines, Barrett sounded at times as if she might wind up being even more ideologically conservative than Scalia. Consider gun rights. She staked out a further-reaching view in a 2019 dissenting opinion for the circuit court than Scalia did in his 2008 majority opinion in the D.C. v. Heller case, which struck down the city’s handgun ban. 

Barrett argued in Kanter v. Barr that the Constitution does not allow the government to ban all felons from possessing firearms, only those who are violent and dangerous. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) noted that Scalia expressly said in his majority opinion in the Heller case that he was not taking away the authority of governments to impose limitations on gun ownership for convicted felons. “And yet you decided he was wrong and that it had to be a violent felony,” Durbin said. “Can you explain why?” 

Barrett answered that “judicial opinions aren’t statutes and shouldn’t be read as if they were.” She said she did her own research of what the founders originally intended that went beyond what Scalia had. “And I concluded that, based on that history, one couldn’t take the right away simply because one was a felon, that there had to be a showing of dangerousness,” she said.

One of the newsiest moments from Tuesday’s hearing came when Barrett explained that she does not consider Roe, the landmark 1973 decision that legalized abortion, among the Supreme Court’s “super precedents” that cannot be overturned. She said she would put Brown v. Board of Education and Marbury v. Madison in that special category. “Roe is not a super precedent because calls for its overruling have never ceased,” Barrett said. “But that doesn’t mean that Roe should be overruled.”

Barrett clerked for Scalia in the 1998-99 term. She signed a newspaper ad in 2006 that decried the “barbaric legacy” of Roe. Asked about this, she said the message was “consistent with the views of my church” but insisted her personal opinions are distinct from her legal approach.

Scalia did not believe that the 14th Amendment provided a right to privacy, something that has been used as the legal basis for not just Roe but also Griswold v. Connecticut, the case that ensured access to contraception. Asked about this, Barrett would only say: “There’s certainly a debate about how to define these rights and how far it should go.”

Barrett declined to say whether it would be constitutional to criminalize the practice of in vitro fertilization. During a separate round of questioning, the previously outspoken social conservative declined to say whether she considers IVF tantamount to manslaughter. “I’ve never expressed a view on it, and for the reasons I’ve already stated, I cannot take policy positions or express my personal views before the committee,” Barrett said.

Barrett also declined to say whether she considers the 1996 decision that struck down the male-only admissions policy of the Virginia Military Institute to be a “super precedent.” The decision was 7-1, and Scalia was the sole dissenter. Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion, and it remained one of her proudest moments on the court right up until she died last month. “Every time you ask a question, I’ll have to say that I can’t grade it,” Barrett told Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.).

Klobuchar noted that Barrett, as a law professor at Notre Dame, gave an interview to National Public Radio in 2015 praising Scalia’s dissent in one of the two cases that saved the Affordable Care Act. Barrett acknowledged that she had said Scalia’s dissent had “the better of the legal argument.” But then she claimed that does not mean she would have ruled the same way and voted with Scalia.

“One of the upsides of being an academic is that you can speak for yourself. A professor professes and can opine. But it’s very different than the judicial decision-making process,” said Barrett, who was confirmed to the Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in late 2017. “So it’s difficult for me to say how I would have decided that case if I had to go through the whole process.” 

Barrett has been pressed repeatedly on a 2017 essay she wrote for a Notre Dame Law School journal in which she argued that Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion when the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Obamacare in 2012, “pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute.”

Barrett said she was not criticizing Roberts, only his legal approach, which she said is not textualism. “You were added to the Supreme Court shortlist after you wrote that article,” said Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.). “My Republican colleagues, who themselves have promised to repeal the ACA, are rushing through your nomination so you can be seated in time to hear this case.”

All her dodging this week has been part of a pattern of evasiveness. Barrett refuses to commit to recuse herself from potential 2020 election cases that could decide the outcome of the election. “I certainly hope that all members of the committee have more confidence in my integrity than to think that I would allow myself to be used as a pawn to decide the election for the American people,” she said.

When asked whether Trump has the unilateral power as president to delay the election, Barrett said she would have to consult colleagues and listen to arguments from both sides. The law is cut and dry: He does not have such power. Congress does. She declined to say whether voter intimidation is illegal. It is, of course. She also refused to say whether a president, under the Constitution, is allowed to pardon himself and family members for past and future crimes.

Seemingly eager to avoid getting crosswise with Trump before she locks down her lifetime appointment, Barrett offered a notably less full-throated defense of judicial independence than we heard from Neil Gorsuch and, to a much lesser extent, Brett Kavanaugh during their confirmation hearings.

Democrats noted that Trump has signaled that he expects his nominee to throw out the ACA, overturn Roe and, if called upon, cast a decisive vote that allows him to cling to power for another four years. “I can’t really speak to what the president has said on Twitter,” Barrett said. “He hasn’t said any of that to me.”

While Barrett has taken umbrage almost every time a Democratic senator asked whether she agrees with some position that Scalia espoused, she has happily waxed poetic about the late justice when Republicans ask about him. When Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) mentioned Scalia’s opposition to looking at the legislative history of how a bill became law, Barrett replied that she was “very comfortable” discussing that.

“Justice Scalia, as was well known, you know, railed against the use of legislative history, and I think it was because at the time that Justice Scalia went on to the D.C. Circuit, before he was on the Supreme Court, the use of legislative history had really kind of gotten out of control,” she said. “I think Justice Scalia really tried to clean that up and say ‘listen, the priority is the text and when the text answers the question, you don’t go to legislative history.’ And there’s some pragmatic reasons to be careful about doing so. You know, legislative history can be long. … So as a general rule, I don’t look to legislative history when I’m deciding cases.” 

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) asked if she agreed with Scalia’s comment in 2005 that, “If you’re going to be a good and faithful judge, you have to resign yourself to the fact that you’re not always going to like the conclusions you reach. If you like them all the time, you’re probably doing something wrong.” She said she agrees with that and then recounted a conversation about the First Amendment when Scalia interviewed her for the clerkship. Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) asked her to “tell us about the Scalia-Ginsberg friendship and the impact it made on you.”

The presence of Trump and the pandemic have nevertheless loomed large during the hearing. White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and Chief of Staff Mark Meadows have flanked Barrett at various points as she answered questions. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) appeared remotely to question Barrett on Tuesday night because she said Republicans have not taken sufficient safety precautions. Two GOP senators on the Judiciary Committee who contracted the coronavirus after attending that Rose Garden ceremony, Mike Lee of Utah and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, participated on Tuesday. 

And, as Barrett testified, the Trump administration announced that Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia’s wife – who was sitting in the second row with other members of the family at the Rose Garden event – is now battling the virus, as well. A statement from the Labor Department said Trish Scalia is experiencing mild symptoms but “doing well.”

Barrett apologized for using the phrase “sexual preference” in reference to the LGBTQ community. The archaic term suggests that being gay is somehow a choice and that people are not born that way. “I certainly didn’t mean and would never mean to use a term that would cause any offense in the LGBT community. So, if I did, I greatly apologize for that,” Barrett said after being upbraided by Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii).

She acknowledged racial bias still exists in the criminal justice system. “I think in our large criminal justice system it would be inconceivable that there wasn’t some implicit bias,” she said. But she professed to be unaware of government studies, cited by Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), that show Black defendants in the United States are more likely to be charged with crimes that carry lengthy mandatory prison terms.

The judge said she has no “firm views” on climate change. “I’m certainly not a scientist,” she said. “I mean, I’ve read things on climate change.” 

Barrett insisted that she did not intentionally conceal from Congress a 2013 newspaper ad she co-signed that criticized Roe and called “for the unborn to be protected in law.” She failed to turn this document over to the committee when she was up for the circuit court in 2017 and only submitted it late Friday night after journalists tracked it down. “It’s really no more than the expression of a pro-life view,” she said.

All 22 senators on the Judiciary Committee got 30 minutes to question Barrett on Tuesday. Today, they are each getting a second round of 20 minutes. Once again, the two sides are alternating based on seniority. This means Harris, the vice-presidential nominee who joined the Senate in 2017, will be the final Democrat to question Barrett for the day. Follow along with our live video coverage all day.

Tomorrow the committee will hear from outside witnesses. Democrats will stay focused on the themes of health care and abortion by calling Stacy Staggs, whose 7-year-old twins were born prematurely and have preexisting conditions; Farhan Bhatti, a family physician; Crystal Good, who at 15 obtained a legal order to obtain an abortion without notifying a parent; and Kristen Clarke, who runs the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Republicans have not yet announced who they plan to call on Barrett’s behalf.

“The federal prosecutor appointed by Attorney General William P. Barr to review whether Obama-era officials improperly requested the identities of individuals whose names were redacted in intelligence documents has completed his work without finding any substantive wrongdoing, according to people familiar with the matter,” Matt Zapotosky and Shane Harris report. “The revelation that U.S. Attorney John Bash, who left the department last week, had concluded his review without criminal charges or any public report will rankle President Trump at a moment when he is particularly upset at the Justice Department. … People familiar with his findings say they would likely disappoint conservatives who have tried to paint the ‘unmasking’ of names — a common practice in government to help understand classified documents — as a political conspiracy. … Before being nominated as the U.S. attorney, Bash worked in the Solicitor General’s Office and as an associate counsel to Trump.”

“The court put on hold a lower-court order that said the count should continue until the end of the month, because of delays brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. The court did not provide a reason, which is common in disposing of the kind of emergency application filed by the administration,” Robert Barnes and Tara Bahrampour report. “This summer, the president said he intended to break with the past and present to Congress census data that did not include undocumented immigrants. Two weeks later, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said he was ending the count early — by the end of September — to meet a Dec. 31 deadline. It is unclear how many Americans are left to be counted. … Plaintiffs, including the National Urban League, several jurisdictions and other groups, contend that a shortened timeline would result in an undercount of harder-to-count populations, including immigrants, minorities and lower-income groups, depriving them of funding and representation.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent: “The harms caused by rushing this year’s census count are irreparable. And respondents will suffer their lasting impact for at least the next 10 years.”

They want the justices to stop lower court rulings allowing Manhattan’s district attorney to enforce his subpoena for the president’s financial records. “District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. has won every round of the legal fight Trump has waged to keep his records private. But Vance agreed not to try to get the records from Trump’s longtime accountants while the president asked the Supreme Court for another intervention,” Barnes reports. “Vance is seeking eight years of the president’s tax returns … In the latest round of litigation, Trump’s lawyers argued to a district judge and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit that the subpoena to Trump’s accounting firm Mazars is an overbroad ‘fishing expedition’ and that it was issued in bad faith to harass him. Those claims were rejected by the lower courts.” 

The Justice Department filed suit to seize all profits of a tell-all memoir about Melania Trump, accusing the author, a former senior aide to the first lady, of violating a White House nondisclosure agreement. “Attorneys for the department’s civil division allege in federal court in Washington that Stephanie Winston Wolkoff failed to obtain written authorization before publishing ‘Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship with the first lady,’” Spencer Hsu reports. “In the book, Winston Wolkoff described what she viewed as extensive mismanagement and opaque accounting for the inauguration, after which she cooperated with law enforcement investigators. But the former right-hand events planner to Vogue editor Anna Wintour has created a larger media storm this month by playing excerpts of phone conversations that she began secretly recording with the first lady in February 2018. The lawsuit is likely to draw renewed attention to the tapes … ‘Who gives a f— about the Christmas stuff and decorations?’ Trump said … On another recording, the first lady refers to porn star Stormy Daniels as ‘the porn hooker.'”

Wolkoff said she fulfilled the agreement and that its confidentiality provisions ended when the White House terminated it: “The President and First Lady’s use of the US Department of Justice to silence me is a violation of my First Amendment Rights and a blatant abuse of the government to pursue their own personal interests and goals,” she wrote in a statement. “I will not be deterred by these bullying tactics.”

Attorneys who have represented government whistleblowers said the NDA to restrict a White House employee from sharing information other than classified material is unenforceable: “The courts since the late ’70s have repeatedly stated the government has no legitimate interest in infringing upon the First Amendment rights of former employees to disseminate unclassified information,” said attorney Bradley Moss. “To succeed in this lawsuit, the government would likely need to unravel that precedent in some form.”

The DOJ lawsuit highlights that Melania Trump has not been seen since the president announced her covid-19 diagnosis. “A coronavirus quarantine was an excuse for the first lady to lay low, as seems to be her preference, and shrug off appearances for a campaign that is faltering among women,” Jada Yuan reports.

“Some of those charged in a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer also discussed ‘taking’ Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, who reacted to the news by accusing Trump of fueling extremism with reckless rhetoric,” Kayla Ruble, Laura Vozzella and Devlin Barrett report. “The disturbing allegations about politically motivated violence surfaced during a day-long court hearing. … Northam, like Whitmer a Democrat, said that as a former Army doctor he had faced threats from foreign enemies but never before from his own commander in chief. … The White House responded by criticizing the two governors.”

“Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced on Tuesday that the Senate will take up a narrow economic relief bill when it comes back in session next week,” Jeff Stein and Erica Werner report. “Trump immediately undermined the move, writing on Twitter: ‘STIMULUS! Go big or go home!!!’ … Senate Republicans balk at a $1.8 trillion relief package Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has offered to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Trump, though, has suggested Republicans should agree to an even bigger deal than what Democrats have offered. Pelosi has already rejected Mnuchin’s offer as completely inadequate … 

“Pelosi later got into a fiery argument on CNN with host Wolf Blitzer who pressed her on why she wouldn’t take the $1.8 trillion Mnuchin deal. Blitzer argued that Americans need it and pointed out that some Democrats in her own caucus want it done. ‘I don’t know why you’re always an apologist and many of your colleagues are apologists for the Republican position,’ Pelosi responded. ‘Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,’ Blitzer chided her. ‘It is nowhere near perfect … we’re not even close to the good,’ Pelosi retorted.”

“The upward trend comes before the increased mingling of people expected to arrive with Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. The virus has become especially rampant in Midwestern states after dominating U.S. coastal and urban areas in the spring,” William Wan and Jacqueline Dupree report. “In 40 states, cases are higher when compared with the week before. Indiana, Minnesota and North Dakota have set a new average high for cases each of the past eight days. More than a dozen other states have set new average highs in recent days. … Even D.C. and some Northeastern states — including Connecticut, New Jersey and New York — are beginning to see case counts creep back up. Hospitalizations for covid-19, the illness caused by the virus, have also begun rising in almost a dozen states — including Ohio and Pennsylvania — raising the specter that increasing death counts will soon follow. … At least 215,000 people in the United States have died of covid-19 … One prominent model — by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington — forecasts that U.S. deaths could rise to more than 394,000 by Feb. 1.” 

“Maverick scientists who call for allowing the coronavirus to spread freely at ‘natural’ rates among healthy young people while keeping most aspects of the economy up and running have found an audience inside the White House and at least one state capitol. The scientists met last week with Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist who has emerged as an influential adviser to Trump on the pandemic,” Joel Achenbach reports. “A senior administration official told reporters … that the proposed strategy — which has been denounced by other infectious-disease experts and has been called ‘fringe’ and ‘dangerous’ by National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins — supports what has been Trump’s policy for months. …

“The three scientists pushing the strategy, which they call Focused Protection, have distinguished academic appointments. Martin Kulldorff is an epidemiologist at Harvard University. Sunetra Gupta is an epidemiologist at the University of Oxford. Jay Bhattacharya is a physician and epidemiologist at Stanford Medical School. They have codified their argument in the form of a document posted online that called itself the Great Barrington Declaration … The declaration does not mention wearing masks, engaging in social distancing, avoiding crowds and indoor environments, or any of the other recommendations pushed by most government and scientific experts. The authors contend that permitting the virus to spread naturally among young people — who are much less likely than their elders to have a severe outcome — will shorten the pandemic by hastening the arrival of herd immunity … Kulldorff, Gupta and Bhattacharya participated in late September in a virtual roundtable discussion with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R). … 

“The Great Barrington Declaration is not a scientific document. As critics readily point out, it presents no data. It has no footnotes, few specific suggestions for how to implement the societal segregation and, unlike most scientific arguments, does not discuss potential objections to the proposal. … Critics of Focused Protection say the idea is impractical, unethical and potentially deadly. There is no way, they say, to segregate society neatly by levels of vulnerability. … Critics note that Sun Belt states, such as Florida, already have seen the consequences of young people flooding bars and socializing as though there were no pandemic: Hospitalizations and deaths spiked within weeks.”

• New research suggests that airborne coronavirus particles travel farther in dry environments, potentially making humidifiers a valuable tool for fighting the pandemic. At higher humidity levels, particles hung in the air for shorter periods of time and were less likely to reach someone seated on the opposite side of a dining table. (Antonia Farzan)
• The coronavirus vaccine may be effective only half the time, the head of the U.K. Vaccine Task Force warned. “The vaccines we have for flu are about 50 percent effective,” Kate Bingham told the Telegram. “We shouldn’t assume it’s going to be better than a flu vaccine, because that’s an equivalent. It’s a mutating … respiratory virus.”
• A spinning studio in Ontario that has been linked to at least 61 coronavirus cases appears to have complied with all public health regulations. Crucially, however, requiring masks for the duration of class was not among those regulations. (Antonia Farzan)
• Soccer superstar Cristiano Ronaldo and Dustin Johnson, the world’s top-ranked golfer, have tested positive. Ronaldo is not experiencing symptoms and has left the Portuguese team to isolate. Johnson has withdrawn from this week’s CJ Cup tournament in Las Vegas. (Matt Bonesteel)
• Multiple European countries continued to tighten restrictions today. (Rick Noack)
• Huge crowds partied in the streets of Liverpool ahead of a strict local lockdown set to go into effect today, despite the area having the third-highest number of hospital admissions in Europe. (Jennifer Hassan)
• Hospital bed occupancy in Russia is at almost 90 percent, as cases and deaths surge. (Hassan)
• Brigham Young University officials believe students on their Idaho campus may be purposefully exposing themselves to covid-19 with the hope that they’ll be able to sell their plasma after recovering. (Salt Lake Tribune)

“The stark reality is that the pandemic has put millions of American workers at risk in ways that few could have imagined just seven months ago. The fallout has revealed an economy and labor force sharply divided along lines of race, class and privilege,” Eli Rosenberg writes. “Workers who are able to do their jobs remotely are almost twice as likely to be White as Black or Hispanic … They also are far more likely to be highly educated and well-off. … In Davis, Calif., there was Khadija Zridi, half of a husband-wife team now delivering restaurant orders for DoorDash. In Omaha, Eric Reeder was heading back into a meatpacking plant because his position as a union official means he worries 24/7 about conditions there. None of the 10 workers who were part of the day think of themselves as heroes. They say they’re simply doing what they must — showing up despite concerns about safety, showing up because of expenses and financial pressures, showing up out of a sense of commitment, even mission.”

“A day after disclosing a ‘consensual, inappropriate messaging relationship’ with a local television anchor, Anchorage Mayor Ethan Berkowitz resigned Tuesday,” the Anchorage Daily News reports. “In recent months, he came under fire from people opposed to a series of emergency orders aimed at limiting the spread of the coronavirus. The rapid downfall of the state’s top elected Democrat began on Friday, just after noon, when Maureen ‘Maria’ Athens, an anchor/reporter for stations KTBY and KYUR, posted unsubstantiated allegations against Berkowitz on social media, accusing him of posting inappropriate photos on an ‘underage girl’s website.’ … The Anchorage Police Department and FBI have said they found no evidence that the allegations about Berkowitz were true.

“At 11 p.m. on Monday, the mayor’s office released a threatening voicemail they said Athens sent Berkowitz on Friday. … ‘You either kill yourself, turn yourself in or do what you need to do,’ she said. She then threatened to ‘personally’ kill Berkowitz and his wife. … Athens was arrested Friday afternoon on assault, disorderly conduct and criminal mischief charges for a fight that day with her TV station manager, whom she also described as her fiance in a court hearing Saturday. … 

“Athens said she and Berkowitz began exchanging messages more than four years ago. … Between 2017 and 2018, Athens posted photos and video on her professional Twitter and Facebook accounts of at least six on-camera interviews with Berkowitz. ‘He gave me attention when I was lonely,’ Athens said. She would not say whether the relationship ever became physical.”

The president responded to Fauci’s warnings that his decision to resume campaign rallies this week was “very troublesome” by mocking the government’s top infectious-disease expert. In a tweet, the president unfavorably compared Fauci’s medical guidance to his errant ceremonial first pitch at a Washington Nationals game in July. These attacks come as the Trump campaign continues to air a misleading campaign ad with an out-of-context clip of Fauci to suggest he endorses the president’s handling of the pandemic. (David Nakamura, Josh Dawsey and Yasmeen Abutaleb)

• Joe Biden made his most direct appeal yet to older voters at a senior center in Florida a day after Trump visited the state. “You’re expendable. You’re forgettable. You’re virtually nobody. That’s how he sees seniors,” Biden said in Pembroke Pines, where he wore a mask the whole time. The Trump campaign responded with an attack ad aimed at scaring seniors by falsely claiming Biden wants to take away their health care. (Sean Sullivan)
• Trump plans on holding an Iowa rally for 10,000, despite warnings from local health officials. The White House task force’s latest report classifies the Des Moines area and Polk County as being in a “yellow zone” for virus transmission, advising that gatherings should be limited to 25 or fewer people. (Des Moines Register)
• Rudy Giuliani held a potential superspreader event in Pennsylvania on Monday. About 75 Trump supporters stood in close proximity to the president’s personal lawyer for half an hour. Giuliani claimed to have tested negative for the coronavirus, but he was present at the debate prep session that featured Chris Christie, Kellyanne Conway, and Bill Stepien, all of whom have since tested positive. (New York)
• Campaigning in Wisconsin, Eric Trump said North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was the first person who “came out to wish” his father well after his coronavirus diagnosis. (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

“Suburban women, will you please like me?” Trump asked during his Pennsylvania rally. 

“A network of more than two dozen similar accounts, many of them using identical language in their tweets, recently has generated more than 265,000 retweets or other amplifying ‘mentions’ on Twitter, according to Clemson University social media researcher Darren Linvill, who has been tracking them since last weekend. Several had tens of thousands of followers, and all but one have now been suspended,” Craig Timberg and Isaac Stanley-Becker report. “Researchers call fake accounts featuring supposed Black users ‘digital blackface’ … Many of the accounts used profile pictures of Black men taken from news reports or other sources. Several of the accounts claimed to be from members of groups with pro-Trump leanings, including veterans, police officers, steelworkers, businessmen and avid Christians. One of the fake accounts had, in the place of a profile photo, the words ‘black man photo’ — a hint of sloppiness by the network’s creators.”

• The pro-Trump super PAC America First Action is airing an ad in Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that uses stock footage from Russia. This is the fourth time in three months that an ad promoting Trump has used footage from Russia. (Politico)
• Trump’s campaign spent an estimated $794,000 per day on Facebook as October began, compared to $621,000 from the Biden campaign. (Jeremy Merrill and Kevin Schaul)
• The Trump campaign wants Omarosa Manigault Newman to spend nearly $1 million for an ad campaign on Trump’s behalf as a “corrective” remedy for her critical comments about Trump in her 2018 book and subsequent interviews. “The recommendation was made in a document filed by the Trump campaign from an expert witness last week as part of an ongoing arbitration case,” the New York Times reports. Legal experts say this would be an illegal, in-kind contribution.
• Early voting began in Texas with crowds of excited voters waiting in line for several hours in some places. A federal panel of judges overturned a lower-court ruling that allowed counties across Texas to offer multiple locations for voters to drop off their absentee ballots in person. Meanwhile, election officials contended with a new lawsuit from the Texas GOP seeking to block the Harris County clerk from allowing registered voters to vote in person from their car or at the curb because of the pandemic. (Michelle Ye Hee Lee, Amy Gardner and Brittney Martin) 
• Democrats are currently dominating the early vote in Florida by a 384,000-vote margin. Many Republicans indicate to pollsters that they would rather vote in person. (Politico)

“Several recent TV ads from Biden’s campaign show him standing with Pope Francis or huddled with a Jesuit priest. He’s reading from a pulpit, bowing his head in prayer, or standing solemnly in front of a church’s stained-glass window,” Matt Viser reports. “In the final stretch of a campaign in which Catholic voters are seen by both parties as a decisive bloc in several battleground states, Biden’s campaign has increasingly highlighted his direct connection to the faith — and his potential to make history as the country’s second Catholic president, 60 years after John F. Kennedy became the first. … Trump and his allies have sought to portray Democrats as anti-Catholic. … Biden’s advisers see his faith and cultural touchstones — he famously carries a rosary in his pocket and in his youth had aspired to become a priest — as important ways to connect with what they refer to as the ‘White working-class Catholic vote’ in the industrial Midwestern states. They also hope this will help him among Hispanic Catholics in the Sun Belt.”

Skyla M. Thomas, 20, “and her partner, Quaylon Pitre, thought they had stability 125 miles away on the outskirts of Lake Charles, La., where Pitre worked as a casino security guard. Thomas cared full-time for their children, including an infant who has been diagnosed with Down syndrome. They rented a three-bedroom house with a yard. Family members were nearby,” Dan Lamothe reports. “That was before Hurricane Laura screamed across the Louisiana shoreline on Aug. 27 with sustained winds of more than 150 mph, devastating their home and thousands of others. They now are part of a diaspora of evacuees spread across hundreds of miles who have been without a permanent home for six weeks. 

“Their numbers are expected to swell after Hurricane Delta rumbled ashore Friday night with Category 2 strength about 15 miles east of Laura’s landfall, raking many of the same areas with a second round of whipping winds and flooding. It was yet another cruelty in an already challenging 2020, with dual hurricanes hitting southwestern Louisiana during a pandemic and an economic collapse. Thousands of displaced and distraught residents now face another indignity: They are waiting for help, sometimes in seedy hotels far from home, hoping that the Federal Emergency Management Agency will come to their rescue with temporary homes, funding, anything.”  

• Half the coral populations on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef have been wiped out in the warming ocean. On some areas of the northern half of the reef, “the abundance of large colonies on the crest dropped” by up to 98 percent, according to a new study. (Darryl Fears)
• California’s devastating wildfire season is far from over, with another period of “elevated to critical” wildfire conditions from today through Friday. Going into this period of “critical” fire risk, the state fire agency counts 14 major wildfires as still burning. A combination of high winds and dry air will allow preexisting fires to spread. (Andrew Freedman)
• Forecasters say last week’s deadly storm complex in New England was a derecho. The weather event left 400,000 customers across the Northeast without power, with the damaging storm felling thousands of trees and claiming two lives. The fatalities, in Clifton Park, N.Y., and Great Barrington, Mass., occurred when trees collapsed on vehicles. (Matthew Cappucci)
• NASA said seven nations have joined the U.S. in signing the Artemis Accords, a series of bilateral agreements that would establish rules for the peaceful use of outer space and govern behavior on the surface of the moon. (Christian Davenport)

In attacking Biden, Trump mocked seniors:

The president retweeted a baseless article attacking Biden that was shared by a QAnon devotee:

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) tweeted advice at the president:

Apple unveiled the iPhone 12, which has new features and 5G integration:

Jimmy Kimmel judged Trump’s dance moves:

Trump says he wants to kiss everyone after his coronavirus battle. Trevor Noah said he’ll pass: