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A Billionaire Governor Is Using His Own Money to Reinstate the Death Penalty

Mother Jones

On May 20, 2015, the Nebraska state Legislature voted to repeal the state’s death penalty. When the Republican governor, Pete Ricketts, vetoed the legislation six days later, the Legislature overrode his veto. It was an extraordinary move, making Nebraska the first solidly conservative state in more than 40 years to end the death penalty.

But the victory for death penalty opponents was short-lived. Having failed in his role as governor to protect the death penalty, Ricketts worked to reinstate it in a different capacity: As a man of deep pockets. Ricketts and his billionaire father, Republican megadonor Joe Ricketts, spent $300,000 on an effort to collect enough signatures to put the death penalty question to voters, in the form of a referendum on November 8. The governor donated another $100,000 this fall to fund a campaign to sway voters to reinstate the death penalty.

“It’s pretty unusual to have a governor who would lose an initiative through the process then try to reverse that process outside of the role of the governor with his own money,” says state Sen. Colby Coash, a conservative Republican and a leader of the anti-death-penalty effort. “Pretty unprecedented.”

Ricketts’ personal funding of the pro-death-penalty campaign has raised questions about the separation of powers in the state, but also about his political motives. The death penalty is an odd issue for Ricketts to stake so much on because, at least in Nebraska, it’s largely symbolic. The state has not carried out an execution in nearly two decades—and critics believe it will not execute anyone in the foreseeable future because the state is unable to obtain the necessary drugs. (Ricketts’ administration even tried, but failed, to obtain execution drugs illegally from India.)

It’s possible that the governor simply feels passionately about the death penalty, which he has long supported. But Ricketts’ critics think he’s using the death penalty to achieve a different objective: consolidating his own power. Ricketts, they say, wanted the death penalty on the ballot in November as a wedge issue to unseat lawmakers who have defied him over the past year. If Ricketts plays his cards right, he could enter the last two years of his first term as a much more powerful governor. From there, he could run for the US Senate—for which he ran unsuccessfully in 2006—or even the White House. “Certainly he sees himself with a future,” says Paul Landow, a professor at the University of Nebraska-Omaha who specializes in state-level politics. “A national future.”

Within a few months of becoming governor in January 2015, Ricketts was clashing with the Legislature—and losing. The first showdown came over a bill to raise the gas tax to pay for repairs to roads and bridges. Ricketts vetoed the 6-cent-per-gallon hike, and the Legislature overrode his veto. Less than two weeks later, the Legislature overrode another veto, this time over the death penalty. The very next day brought a third override, over a bill to allow driver’s licenses for young immigrants who were granted temporary legal status under President Barack Obama’s 2012 executive action to help children of undocumented immigrants. A year later, the Legislature would override Ricketts’ veto of a bill permitting these same immigrants to obtain professional and commercial licenses.

Ricketts has made no secret of his anger at the legislators who voted against him on those measures. At the state Republican Party convention this spring, he read aloud the names of more than a dozen GOP senators who had crossed him and called for electing Republican senators who do not stray from the party’s platform. (The Legislature is unicameral, but its members are known as senators.) This is a faux pas in Nebraska, where the Legislature is ostensibly nonpartisan, although it’s no secret which members are Republicans and which are Democrats. Thirteen senators, including five Republicans, chastised Ricketts in an open letter for attacking “respected conservatives elected by the people to obey their own convictions and principles, not the governor’s.”

But Ricketts was doing more than lecturing the Legislature. By the time he gave that speech, he had already endorsed a challenger to one of the Republicans who had clashed with him on those vetoes. Later in the summer, he gave his support to another challenger of an incumbent Republican. Meanwhile, Americans for Prosperity and Trees of Liberty, two groups affiliated with the Koch brothers, used a direct-mail campaign to target incumbent Republicans who had defied Ricketts on the vetoes. (The groups are not required to disclose their donors.) After a May primary—Nebraska employs a jungle primary system in which the top two vote-earners face off in the general election—three sitting Republicans are confronting GOP challengers on November 8.

With the death penalty question on the ballot, these challengers are making it a central campaign issue as they try to oust sitting Republicans who voted to repeal it. They’re “trying to ride it to election,” says state Sen. Mike Gloor, a Republican who voted to repeal the death penalty. Vincent Powers, the head of the state Democratic Party, puts it more bluntly. “Ricketts just wants to impose his will on the Legislature, and so he’s using this emotional issue as a club,” he says. “It’s very troubling if you are like me and you think democracy is a good thing.”

The fact that the repeal effort succeeded at all was something of a miracle. For decades, state Sen. Ernie Chambers, a liberal independent who has served in the Legislature since the 1970s, has unsuccessfully introduced a bill to abolish the state’s death penalty. But in 2015, with a large freshman class open to arguments against the death penalty, a few conservatives in the Legislature took up the cause as well.

By all accounts, Nebraska’s death penalty is a failure. The last execution in the state took place in 1997, but the state continues to spend $14.6 million a year on costs related to maintaining the death penalty, according to a study commissioned by the state’s anti-death penalty coalition. The legislators who voted to repeal it had come to believe that the death penalty was not just a financial loser but also bad policy that was unfairly applied, used to coerce suspects into pleading guilty, and capable of putting innocent people to death.

As the death penalty fight moved from the Legislature to the ballot initiative, a coalition of conservatives, liberals, and the Catholic Church came together to fight to retain the repeal. The coalition has spent more than $2.5 million on voter education efforts, canvassing, and TV ads—far more than its pro-death-penalty counterpart has spent.

Even with the active backing of the Nebraska Catholic Conference in the heavily Catholic state, the consensus is that a popular referendum on the death penalty in a deep-red state is a heavy lift. But there are a few wild cards that could help the anti-death penalty side in a close contest. The first is the language on the ballot itself, which could confuse some death penalty supporters, who need to vote “repeal” to reverse the existing death penalty ban. When the ballot language was finalized, the coalition opposing the death penalty quickly changed its name to Retain a Just Nebraska so that death penalty opponents would know to vote “retain” to keep the ban.

The second big question is turnout. Nebraska does not have a governor’s race or a US Senate race this year, leaving the presidential race as the main draw for voters to get to the polls. But Nebraska, though deeply conservative, is not exactly Trump territory. Ricketts endorsed Trump after his first choice, Ted Cruz, dropped out of the primary, but he has not donated to Trump’s campaign; his wife, meanwhile, registered as a Democrat and is supporting Hillary Clinton. Both of the state’s Republican US senators have spoken out against Trump: Ben Sasse is perhaps the most prominent Never Trump Republican in the country, while Deb Fischer unendorsed him after the infamous 2005 Access Hollywood video was leaked in early October. (She later re-endorsed him.) “I think there’s a legitimate chance that the Legislature will be held up,” Coash says hopefully. “It all comes down to turnout.”

Most politicians and analysts predict the repeal will be overturned because Nebraska is such a conservative state. “I would be absolutely shocked if the voters basically supported to keep the repeal of the death penalty,” says Aaron Trost, a Republican operative who ran Fischer’s campaign in 2012. In August, the pro-death-penalty group released a poll showing that 2 out of 3 Nebraskans support the death penalty. Dan Parsons, the spokesman for the anti-death-penalty group, has argued that the poll was “flawed.” Unlike the poll, the referendum states that if the death penalty repeal stands, defendants who would otherwise have received a death sentence would instead get life in prison. Previous polling has shown that when life without parole is mentioned as the alternative to the death penalty, some Americans switch from death penalty support to opposition.

“We’ve outworked them and outmaneuvered them for over a year now,” Parsons says. As of early October, according to campaign finance disclosures, the anti-death-penalty group had raised $2.7 million to the pro-death-penalty group’s $1.2 million—and most of the latter funds were spent gathering signatures to put the issue on the ballot.

The anti-death penalty group received big donations from liberal philanthropic organizations. Major contributors to the pro-death penalty group include Pete and Joe Ricketts and billionaire Republican donor Robert Mercer, as well as two national dark-money groups. One of those groups, Citizens for a Sound Government, spent money on Ricketts’ behalf during his 2014 primary. It’s unclear who is behind the groups’ money or why outside groups see fit to invest in the death penalty in Nebraska. One possibility is that they’re investing in something else: Ricketts’ broader conservative agenda and his career, perhaps on the national stage.

“Should the ballot initiative lose, that would be a big blow to him,” says Landow, the political scientist. “So it’s a gamble. And he took it, I think, because he calculated that it was worth it in terms of his future national standing.”

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A Billionaire Governor Is Using His Own Money to Reinstate the Death Penalty

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Before Republicans Ran from Donald Trump, They Let Him Win the Nomination

Mother Jones

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Republican politicians began abandoning Donald Trump in droves Saturday, just hours after an unearthed video from 2005 revealed the Republican nominee crudely bragging about what amounted to sexual assault. After months of demurring while Trump’s offensive comments piled up, dozens of leaders are finally walking away from their party’s nominee. Now, many say they can’t support him. Some are even urging the party to deploy some sort of last-minute maneuver to remove Trump from the GOP ticket.

But as the party engages in a collective weekend meltdown, it’s important to remember that Trump’s nomination wasn’t inevitable. There’s no doubt that Trump tapped into an anti-establishment, grassroots fervor that helped him win the nomination. But there was a months-long slog, during which time Republicans—many of whom are now denouncing him—could have have put up a fight against him. When Trump effectively clinched the nomination by winning the Indiana primary on May 3, the Republican establishment had barely lifted a finger to deprive Trump of the nomination.

Even before Friday’s revelations by The Washington Post, anti-Trump Republican strategists were expressing dismay at how easy it had become for Trump to take over the entire party.

“I was extremely surprised by how easy people rolled over for him,” Tim Miller, a Republican in the Never-Trump camp, told Mother Jones in an interview shortly before the 2005 video was released Friday afternoon. “I never could have imagined, even as late as last year, that the establishment of the Republican Party in Washington would just completely roll over for Trump and there would be minimal objection to his nomination. It just blew me away that there were not mass resignations or very visible objections.”

Miller, an alum of the Republican National Committee, worked as Jeb Bush’s communications director. When Bush dropped out of the primary after the South Carolina primary on February 20, Miller went to work for Our Principles PAC, an anti-Trump effort funded largely by billionaires Joe and Marlene Ricketts.

“There was still plenty of time to slow down Trump and to stop Trump,” Miller recalled. He said the super PAC tried to get Republicans leaders in upcoming primary states to object to Trump, from governors, congressmen, and senators to retired politicians and conservative pundits. His group had almost no luck.

“You know, this was doable,” Miller said. “And because a lot of politicians did not want to take the risk, because a lot of them did not feel like Ted Cruz was that much better—which was BS—nobody stuck their neck out there. And I, you know, I can’t believe it.”

Not only did Republican officials refuse to stick their necks out, neither did more than a handful of Republican donors. “The Ricketts, to their credit, stuck their neck out on this and created this PAC,” Miller said. “After Jeb dropped out there were a few other donors who got on board. But it was a small number of donors who were carrying a big load on this for sure.”

In the end, even that wasn’t enough. The Ricketts later switched sides and gave $1 million to a super PAC supporting Trump.

Of course, Trump hasn’t changed in the months since he was just one of 17 candidates. Back then, he was still a birther with a history of misogynist behavior (which he continued during the campaign), spreading fear towards immigrants and Muslims. And yet, as Miller put it, the establishment just “rolled over for him.”

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Before Republicans Ran from Donald Trump, They Let Him Win the Nomination

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Biofuel Advocates to EPA: Extend the Blend

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Biofuel Advocates to EPA: Extend the Blend

Posted 13 June 2016 in

National

Advocates from across the nation arrived in Kansas City recently to testify at the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) one and only field hearing on proposed 2017 targets under the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS). Out of about 160 registered speakers, nearly 90 percent urged the EPA to make more ethanol and other biofuels available to consumers in next year’s fuel mix.

Some of the renewable fuel sector’s top champions also hosted a press conference to remind policymakers and the public how the RFS works to protect the environment, preserve America’s energy security, and provide consumers with more affordable options at the fuel pump. Watch the video here

Speaking to a full house of reporters and ethanol supporters, the nation’s biofuel advocates rallied around the RFS. From left to right: Pete Ricketts, governor of Nebraska; Bob Dinneen, president and CEO of the Renewable Fuels Association; Emily Skor, CEO of Growth Energy; Chip Bowling, president of the National Corn Growers Association; Brooke Coleman, executive director of the Advanced Biofuels Business Council; Chris Soules, Iowa farmer and star of The Bachelor; Annette Sweeney, Iowa farmer and former state representative; Brian Sowers, co-host of Crappie Masters TV; Richard Fordyce, Missouri director of agriculture.

Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts kicked things off, saying, “A strong RFS means more jobs here at home, greater energy security, and a cleaner environment. The biofuels industry supports more than 852,000 American jobs and creates fuel we need to help our country become energy independent. It also stimulates investments in states like Nebraska, where we are on the forefront of research, development, and infrastructure for first- and second-generation biofuels.”

Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts urges the EPA to increase biofuel targets.

Later in the program, Chip Bowling, president of the National Corn Growers Association, had some fun, noting his own nickname – King Corn – before introducing Iowa farmer Chris Soules, who many called Prince Farming during his stint as The Bachelor on the hit television series.

Chris was quick to capture the crowd, both in the room and on social media:

 

One thing everyone agreed on was that the EPA must increase its 2017 targets. The agency has proposed conventional blending targets at 200 million gallons below statutory levels, as set by Congress.

Bob Dinneen, president and CEO of the Renewable Fuels Association, said, “The EPA’s proposed targets would needlessly undermine America’s most successful clean energy program. At a minimum, we must hit the statutory levels set by Congress to slash U.S. dependence on foreign oil, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and save consumers money at the pump. From any objective standpoint, the choice should be simple – more clean, American energy and less foreign oil.”

Bob Dinneen, president and CEO of the Renewable Fuels Association, calls on the EPA to aim higher during his testimony at the Kansas City field hearing.

To push the EPA in the right direction, biofuel leaders urged supporters, neighbors, and friends to submit comments to the EPA by July 11, when regulators will start writing a final rule.

“Our call to action has never been more important,” said Emily Skor, CEO of Growth Energy. “Ethanol is an earth-friendly biofuel that reduces greenhouse gas emissions and displaces chemicals in gasoline that form potent carcinogens when burned. Most importantly, ethanol offers consumers affordable options and a choice at the gas pump. It’s vital that the EPA meet the statutory biofuel targets for America’s 2017 fuel mix.”
 

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Biofuel Advocates to EPA: Extend the Blend

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Clinton’s New Pitch to Iowa Voters: Republicans Want Sanders to Win

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton’s campaign has recently turned to a new tactic to convince Iowa Democrats that they should caucus for her over Sen. Bernie Sanders: Republicans, the campaign says, want Sanders to win.

Clinton and her surrogates have taken to pointing out that Republican super-PACs and donors have started to air ads that appear intended to boost Sanders’ campaign. “The best evidence that I have the best plan is that the Republicans and their billionaire allies are running ads against me,” Clinton told a crowd at a middle school in Marshalltown, Iowa, on Tuesday night. Clinton was referring to the news that Joe Ricketts, a major Republican donor, is funding a super-PAC to air ads in Iowa that could serve to bolster Sanders’ caucus bid by describing him as “too liberal.”

“Now you’ve got to stop and think, why are they spending all this money trying to convince Democrats not to support me?” Clinton said.

She also lashed out at former George W. Bush guru Karl Rove, who since his former patron left the White House has founded a top conservative super-PAC, which is running ads portraying Clinton as beholden to Wall Street. “Along came Karl Rove, the errand boy for the billionaires,” she said. “He’s now running an ad against me.”

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Clinton’s New Pitch to Iowa Voters: Republicans Want Sanders to Win

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4 Years Ago Scott Walker Promised This Woman He’d Bust Wisconsin’s Unions

Mother Jones

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The super-PAC backing Scott Walker has many wealthy backers, but its single biggest contributor is Diane Hendricks, who ponied up $5 million. A billionaire through the roofing supply business she and her late husband founded, Hendricks has been one of Walker’s top benefactors since he first ran for governor. In 2012, Hendricks was the biggest donor to Walker’s campaign to stave off a union-led recall effort, and now she’s stepped up for him again. Out of the $20 million raised by the pro-Walker group Unintimidated PAC, 25 percent came from Hendricks.

If there was any question that Walker and Hendricks are on the same page, here’s a video of the two chatting in 2011 shortly after he took office.

“Good to see you!” Walker says, dashing through the door and hugging Hendricks and kissing her on the cheek.

Hendricks asks Walker about the possibility of turning Wisconsin into a “completely red state”.

“Oh, yeah,” Walker responds, going on to lay out his “divide and conquer” strategy for attacking public sector unions.

Despite her massive contribution, Hendricks still has some close competition as the group’s biggest funder. Marlene Ricketts, the wife of TD Ameritrade founder and Chicago Cubs owner Joe Ricketts, gave $4.9 million. And Joe Ricketts himself tossed in another $100,000.

Richard Uihlein and his wife Elizabeth, the founder and president of Illinois box company Uline, respectively, gave $2.5 million to the super-PAC as well.

Rounding out the list of seven-figure donors was Access Industries, a New York City holding company run by Len Blavatnik. Blavatnik is a Ukranian-born businessman who in April was named the “richest man in Britain” with an estimated net worth of $20.1 billion. Blavatnik, who is a US citizen, is also known for his lavish donations to universities including Oxford and Tel Aviv University. On Thursday, the super-PAC supporting Lindsey Graham reported receiving $500,000 from Blavatnik’s company.

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4 Years Ago Scott Walker Promised This Woman He’d Bust Wisconsin’s Unions

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