Today’s installment of campaign-related news items from across the country.
* A new national Associated Press poll found President Joe Biden with a surprisingly robust 61% approval rating — a level of support his immediate predecessor never came close to reaching. That said, most other recent polling doesn’t show Biden’s approval rating quite this high.
* Biden’s acting attorney general, Monty Wilkinson, yesterday rescinded two elected-related memos from the Trump administration. CNN reported that Wilkinson “announced that the Justice Department will pull back the November memo from former Attorney General William Barr on vote fraud investigations and a second memo that gave Justice Department blessing to efforts by some states to pull back expansions of voting access, such as early or absentee voting, as a result of the Covid crisis.”
* The Denver Post reported this week that Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) paid herself more than $22,000 in mileage reimbursements from her campaign account, which seems like a problem: ‘To justify those reimbursements, Boebert would have had to drive 38,712 miles while campaigning, despite having no publicly advertised campaign events in March, April or July, and only one in May. Furthermore, because the reimbursements came in two payments — a modest $1,060 at the end of March and $21,200 on Nov. 11 — Boebert would have had to drive 36,870 miles in just over seven months between April 1 and Nov. 11 to justify the second payment.”
* After many House Republicans offered Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) a standing ovation during a closed-door conference meeting yesterday, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) was unimpressed. The Illinois congressman called his party’s reaction “disappointing by a factor of 1,000.”
* So far, only one senator has opposed literally every Biden cabinet nominee during confirmation votes: Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.). For what it’s worth, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) tried a similar tack ahead of her 2020 presidential campaign, and Democratic voters seemed indifferent. * Republican legislators in Kentucky yesterday overrode a series of vetoes from Gov. Andy Beshear (D), including a measure that limits the governor’s authority to change election procedures during emergencies, such as a deadly pandemic. * And Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) suggested this week that he’d “absolutely” give up his seat in Congress in order to help defend Donald Trump during next week’s Senate impeachment trial. “I would do anything I had to do to ensure that the greatest president in my lifetime, one of the greatest presidents our country’s ever had, maybe the greatest president our country has ever had, got a full-throated defense that wasn’t crouched down, that wasn’t in fear of losing some moderate Republican senator, but that was worthy of the fight he gave to the great people of this country for four years,” the Florida Republican said.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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