Matt Gaetz’s father seeks return to Florida Senate

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Don Gaetz, a former Republican state Senate president and father of MAGA firebrand GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz, is seeking a return to the Florida Legislature.

Gaetz, 75, planned to file paperwork on Monday to run for the state Senate seat now held by outgoing Sen. Doug Broxson, who is leaving office next year due to term limits.

Gaetz, who has held a variety of appointed positions since leaving elected office in 2016, said that he has been approached in recent weeks by voters in the Panhandle asking him to run.

“This will sound like maybe it’s not true, but there was a wellspring of support and encouragement and even demands that I run for office from people in Northwest Florida who I know and respect and people in Northwest Florida who I do not know,” Gaetz said.

One of the voices of encouragement to run was state Sen. Ben Albritton, the Polk County Republican in line to become the next Senate president in late 2024. In the last cycle, Gov. Ron DeSantis pushed several candidates to run for the state Senate even though Senate leaders had planned to back other candidates. Gaetz’ return to the Senate could provide a prominent counterweight to the governor.

Gaetz’s decision to enter the race prompted former state Rep. Frank White, a Pensacola Republican, to drop out of the contest even though he was the only candidate for the post.

Gaetz added that he is also concerned that, while Florida is a low-tax state, the rising costs associated with of property insurance, housing and utilities is making it expensive. He said that the Legislature can address the causes and the “political pressure” that are behind how costly the state is getting.

Don Gaetz began his political career as a school board member and later schools superintendent for Okaloosa County. He first ran for state Senate in 2006 and rose to Senate president after the 2012 elections.

During his time in office, Gaetz was more than willing to engage in his fair share of political brawls, including taking on then-Gov. Rick Scott. Scott, currently a U.S. senator, who lined up opposition to Gaetz’s bid to become president of the University of West Florida.

In his farewell note to his constituents when left the Senate, Gaetz wrote: “I cherish the smashmouth fights over matters of principle. I richly earned my opponents, giving, I hope, as good as I got. Politics can be thrilling and noble, just as it can be base and disgusting.”

While he was in office, his son Matt Gaetz ran for the state House and the two served in the Legislature at the same time and even roomed together in Tallahassee. In the Legislature, Don Gaetz became known for his oratory skills — and just like his son — the ability to come up with a snappy comeback or a tartly-worded reply.

And while the younger Gaetz was once in the shadow of his successful father, he has since eclipsed him as a fervent supporter of former President Donald Trump and an enemy of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif), threatening over the weekend to oust McCarthy from his speakership.

Now, Rep. Matt Gaetz is seen as a potential candidate for Florida governor in 2026, but his father said that has nothing to do with his decision to run.

“Matt has encouraged me to run for the Senate, but I know in Washington he is laser focused on the budget issues, trying to control spending, trying to pass term limits,” said Gaetz, who said his son will run for another term in Congress next year. “He is not focused on running for governor. He has no plans to run for governor.”

After Gaetz left office, he held key appointed positions including a spot on Florida’s ethics commission and as the chair of the board of a non-profit corporation responsible for handing out tens of millions of dollars given to the state in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster.

The elder Gaetz was also drawn into the federal trafficking probe of his son after a Florida businessman tried to extort $25 million from him in exchange for helping Matt Gaetz secure a presidential pardon. The DOJ later closed its investigation into Matt Gaetz without filing charges.

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Barbara Lee on Laphonza Butler: 'I wish her well'

Rep. Barbara Lee said Monday that she’s looking forward to working with Laphonza Butler as California’s newly appointed senator, but she’s still focused on winning the Senate seat in 2024.

“I wish her well and look forward to working with her to deliver for our golden state,” Lee (D-Calif.) said on CNN Monday. “I'm very focused on winning this election, though. ... People underestimate what we have going on for us in my campaign.”

POLITICO first reported on Sunday that California Gov. Gavin Newsom would appoint Butler to the Senate seat following Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s death last week. Butler is president of EMILY's List and a veteran organizer who is well-known in Newsom’s orbit.

Newsom pledged in 2021 to name a Black woman to Feinstein's seat in the event that she resigned after he faced pressure to fill Kamala Harris' Senate seat with a Black woman after she became vice president but opted to tap Alex Padilla instead. The California governor avoided getting caught up in the 2024 Senate contest between rival Reps. Katie Porter, Adam Schiff and Lee by appointing Butler.

Lee had spent years aiming for the possible Senate appointment but learned in recent weeks that Newsom was intent on not picking a candidate, prompting her to sharply rebuke his public pronouncement.

“The idea that a Black woman should be appointed only as a caretaker to simply check a box is insulting to countless Black women across this country who have carried the Democratic Party to victory election after election,” Lee said earlier this month.

Newsom made his appointment this week without putting limitations or preconditions on his pick to run for the seat in 2024 — meaning Butler could decide to join the race for a full term. She has not indicated thus far if she plans to do so or not.

“We have been pushing from day one that any African American woman who he appointed should have the right and opportunity to run,” Lee said on CNN. “And so we were glad that he made that decision to open that up and to back off of the restriction that was placed.”

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Garland: I'd resign if Biden asked me to take action on Trump

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Merrick Garland said in an interview that aired Sunday that he would resign if asked by President Joe Biden to take action against Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump. But he doesn’t think he’ll be put in that position.

“I am sure that that will not happen, but I would not do anything in that regard,” he said on CBS “60 Minutes.” “And if necessary, I would resign. But there is no sense that anything like that will happen.”

The Justice Department is at the center of not only indictments against Trump that include an effort to overturn the 2020 election and wrongly keeping classified documents, but also cases involving Biden’s son Hunter, the aftermath of the riot at the U.S. Capitol and investigations into classified documents found in the president’s home and office. Garland has appointed three separate special counsels.

Garland has spoken only sparingly about the cases and reiterated Sunday he would not get into specifics, but dismissed claims by Trump and his supporters that the cases were timed to ruin his chances to be president in 2024.

“Well, that’s absolutely not true. Justice Department prosecutors are nonpartisan. They don’t allow partisan considerations to play any role in their determinations,” Garland said.

Garland said the president has never tried to meddle in the investigations, and he dismissed criticism from Republicans that he was going easy on the president’s son, Hunter, who was recently indicted on a gun charge after a plea deal in his tax case fell apart. Hunter Biden is due in a Delaware court this week.

“We do not have one rule for Republicans and another rule for Democrats. We don’t have one rule for foes and another for friends,” he said. ”We have only one rule; and that one rule is that we follow the facts and the law, and we reach the decisions required by the Constitution, and we protect civil liberties.”

Garland choked up when talking about his concerns over violence, particularly as judges and prosecutors assigned to the Trump cases got death threats.

“People can argue with each other as much as they want and as vociferously as they want. But the one thing they may not do is use violence and threats of violence to alter the outcome,” he said. “American people must protect each other. They must ensure that they treat each other with civility and kindness, listen to opposing views, argue as vociferously as they want, but refrain from violence and threats of violence. That’s the only way this democracy will survive.”

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Ramaswamy campaign seeks to cut number of candidates in next GOP debate

Vivek Ramaswamy's campaign is pushing the Republican Party to change the qualifying and debate format rules for the upcoming GOP presidential debate in Miami on Nov. 8, calling for only the top four polling candidates besides Donald Trump to participate and asking for a single moderator, according to a campaign memo obtained by POLITICO.

The third Republican presidential debate will be held Nov. 8 in Miami, and Trump’s rival campaigns face the most difficult qualifying thresholds yet: Candidates need to have 70,000 individual donors and hit 4 percent in either two national polls, or one national poll and two polls from separate early states.

In the Sunday evening letter, Ramaswamy’s campaign CEO Ben Yoho wrote to Republican Chair Ronna McDaniel that “against the backdrop of a chaotic second debate and the reality of a frontrunner who has declined to participate, we respectfully call on the RNC to revise its approach so that Republican voters can focus on serious candidates who have a viable path to beating Joe Biden — or whomever the Democrats put up to replace him.”

With seven candidates on the stage, the second debate last week in Simi Valley, Calif., saw Fox Business’ two moderators alongside Univision's struggle to control the debate at times, with multiple candidates interrupting each other.

“Thank you for speaking while I’m interrupting,” Ramaswamy said at one particularly contentious point during the debate.

In addition to a smaller stage, Ramaswamy’s campaign also calls for “greater time for candidates to respond to their competitors.”

“Another unhelpful debate in November is not an option: Voters deserve a real choice for who will best serve as our party’s nominee,” Yoho wrote in the memo to the RNC, as well as Committee on Arrangements Co-Chairs David Bossie and Anne Hathaway.

“Voters are not well-served when a cacophony of candidates with minimal chance of success talk over each other from the edge of the stage, while the overwhelming frontrunner is absent from the center of that same stage.”

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California Republicans have McCarthy's back. For now.

Anaheim, Calif. — Kevin McCarthy has always had a strained relationship with hard-right activists in his home state. But as the party faithful gathered here over the weekend, the House speaker got a pass from an unlikely corner: GOP diehards who are often the first to bash the establishment.

At a Republican state convention down the road from Disneyland — and as conservatives in Washington called for McCarthy's head — the rank-and-file of the California GOP was almost commiserating with the embattled Bakersfield native.

“It’s a tough job — it’s not easy,” Paula Whitsell, chair of the San Diego County Republican Party, said immediately after McCarthy passed a bill Saturday with Democratic support to avert a government shutdown. “I trust him. He’s experienced. He knows what he’s doing to get everybody to the table.”

It's possible once delegates decamp from the convention and return to conservative TV overnight or AM talk radio in the morning, they will rally around Rep. Matt Gaetz’s (R-Fla.) effort to depose the speaker. But at a convention dominated by presidential campaign appearances and feuding over hot-button issues like abortion, the focus of grassroots Republicans here were barely attuned to the ins-and-outs of a blockbuster weekend in Washington.

And it isn’t because California Republicans are in the tank for their most prominent elected official. Though McCarthy has delivered money and high-wattage speakers to the state’s otherwise struggling party apparatus, the grassroots base is still leery of a politician who, in their view, personifies the establishment.

Woody Woodman, a San Diego delegate who was manning the California Tea Party booth, said he had more faith in conservative firebrands like Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.). McCarthy was guilty of “going native” when he went to Washington, Woodman said.

Still, Woodman wasn’t outraged over the government funding vote. The push for a shutdown, he said, was not as clear-cut as some of McCarthy’s Washington antagonists made it out to be. While Woodman wanted spending to be slashed, he also chafed at the thought of members of the military potentially not getting a paycheck.

Mark Rizk, a delegate from Los Angeles, dismissed Gaetz’s anti-McCarthy crusade as “very petty and very immature and childish.”

“McCarthy is the speaker of the House, and he's going to be speaker of the House until whenever the Democrats take back the House,” Rizk said.

As news surrounding the spending negotiations reached California, McCarthy was not without detractors. Rebekah Carlson, a party delegate from Yuba north of Sacramento, said her party should “grow a set of balls.” Frances Kay Marshall, a Republican from Los Angeles, said she thought McCarthy should be removed as speaker.

But even Marshall was far more passionate talking about critical race theory, transgender issues and former President Donald Trump’s appearance at the convention. The details of congressional machinations were of little interest.

“I haven’t really been watching and paying attention to what’s going on,” said Marshall, donning a sparkly gold ball gown and a pearl-encrusted captain’s hat that read ‘TRUMP.’ “A lot of my focus right now is with the California GOP.”

Where the focus was not was on McCarthy — even among Republicans here staking their political careers on winning over the conservative base.

Asked how McCarthy was viewed by the party, Denice Gary-Pandol, a Kern County political scientist who is running a long-shot bid for late Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s seat, paused and sighed before offering her assessment.

“I know Kevin loves our veterans,” she said. “He cares about veterans and that’s really a good thing.”

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Rep. Dean Phillips to step down from leadership position after his calls for a primary challenger to Biden

Rep. Dean Phillips will step down from his role as co-chair of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee, but “will remain in his congressional seat representing MN-03 and will remain a part of the Democratic Caucus,” a spokesperson for the Minnesota lawmaker confirmed to POLITICO in a statement.

“My convictions relative to the 2024 presidential race are incongruent with the majority of my caucus, and I felt it appropriate to step aside from elected leadership to avoid unnecessary distractions during a critical time for our country,” Phillips said in a statement forwarded by the spokesperson. “I celebrate Leader [Hakeem] Jeffries for his remarkable and principled leadership and extend gratitude to my outstanding friends and colleagues for having created space and place for my perspectives. I’ll continue to abide by my convictions, place people over politics, and support our shared mission to deliver security, opportunity, and prosperity for all Americans.”

Axios first reported Phillips’ plans.

The moderate Democrat has floated the possibility of mounting a primary challenge against President Joe Biden, meeting with donors in New York over the summer to talk about the prospect.

In August he called on other Democrats to “jump in” to the presidential race, citing polling from The New York Times that showed most Democrats would prefer someone other than Biden in the 2024 presidential race.

“I think I’m well positioned to be president [of] the United States. … I do not believe I’m well positioned to run for it right now,” he said at the time.

But as of last week, Phillips still had not ruled out a White House bid.

“I am thinking about it. I haven’t ruled it out,” Phillips said during an interview on “The Warning” podcast, though he noted that there people “more proximate, better prepared to campaign with national organizations, national name recognition, which I do not possess.”

“I’m concerned that something could happen between now and next November that would make the Democratic Convention in Chicago an unmitigated disaster,” he told podcast host Steve Schmidt.

Biden is already facing two intraparty challenges from the author Marianne Williamson and the lawyer and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., though he holds a significant lead in the polls over both.

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Jimmy Carter turns 99 at home with Rosalynn and other family

ATLANTA — Jimmy Carter has always been a man of discipline and habit. But the former president broke routine Sunday, putting off his practice of quietly watching church services online to instead celebrate his 99th birthday with his wife, Rosalynn, and their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren in Plains.

The gathering took place in the same one-story structure where the Carters lived before he was first elected to the Georgia Senate in 1962. As tributes poured in from around the world, it was an opportunity for Carter’s family to honor his personal legacy.

“The remarkable piece to me and I think to my family is that while my grandparents have accomplished so much, they have really remained the same sort of South Georgia couple that lives in a 600-person village where they were born,” said grandson Jason Carter, who chairs the board at The Carter Center, which his grandparents founded in 1982 after leaving the White House a year earlier.

Despite being global figures, the younger Carter said his grandparents have always “made it easy for us, as a family, to be as normal as we can be.”

At The Carter Center in Atlanta, meanwhile, 99 new American citizens, who came from 45 countries, took the oath of allegiance as part of a naturalization ceremony timed for the former president’s birthday.

“This is so impressive, and I’m so happy for it to be here,” said Tania Martinez after the ceremony. A 53-year-old nurse in Roswell, Martinez was born in Cuba and came to the U.S. from Ghana 12 years ago.

“Now, I will be free forever,” she said, tears welling.

Celebrating the longest-lived U.S. president this way was inconceivable not long ago. The Carters announced in February that their patriarch was forgoing further medical treatments and entering home hospice care after a series of hospitalizations. Yet Carter, who overcame cancer diagnosed at age 90 and learned to walk after having his hip replaced at age 94, defied all odds again.

“If Jimmy Carter were a tree, he’d be an towering, old Southern oak,” said Donna Brazile, a former Democratic national chairperson and presidential campaign manager who got her start on Carter’s campaigns. “He’s as good as they come and tough as they come.”

Jill Stuckey, a longtime Plains resident who visits the former first couple regularly, cautioned to “never underestimate Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter.”

His latest resilience has allowed Carter a rare privilege even for presidents: He’s been able to enjoy months of accolades typically reserved for when a former White House resident dies. The latest round includes a flood of messages from world leaders and pop culture figures donning “Jimmy Carter 99” hats, with many of them focusing on Carter’s four decades of global humanitarian work after leaving the Oval Office.

Katie Couric, the first woman to anchor a U.S. television network’s evening news broadcast, praised Carter in a social media video for his “relentless effort every day to make the world a better place.”

She pointed to Carter’s work to eradicate Guinea worm disease and river blindness, while advocating for peace and democracy in scores of countries. She noted he has written 32 books and worked for decades with Habitat for Humanity building houses for low-income people.

“Oh, yeah, and you were governor of Georgia. And did I mention president of the United States?” she joked. “When are you going to stop slacking off?”

Bill Clinton, the 42nd president and first Democratic president after Carter’s landslide defeat, showed no signs of the chilly relationship the two fellow Southerners once had.

“Jimmy! Happy birthday,” Clinton said in his video message. “You only get to be 99 once. It’s been a long, good ride, and we thank you for your service and your friendship and the enduring embodiment of the American dream.”

Musician Peter Gabriel led concertgoers at Madison Square Garden in a rendition of “Happy Birthday,” as did the Indigo Girls at a recent concert.

In Atlanta, the Carter Library & Museum and adjacent Carter Center held a weekend of events, including the citizenship ceremony. The museum offered 99-cent admission Saturday. The commemoration there was able to continue Sunday only because Congress came to an agreement to avoid a partial government shutdown at the start of the federal fiscal year, which coincides with Carter’s birthday.

Jason Carter said his grandfather has found it “gratifying” to see reassessments of his presidency. Carter’s term often has been broad-brushed as a failure because of inflation, global fuel shortages and the holding of American hostages in Iran, a confluence that led to Republican Ronald Reagan’s 1980 romp.

Yet Carter’s focus on diplomacy, his emphasis on the environment before the climate crisis was widely acknowledged and his focus on efficient government — his presidency added a relative pittance to the national debt — have garnered second looks from historians.

Indeed, Carter’s longevity offers a frame to illuminate both how much the world has changed over his lifetime while still recognizing that certain political and societal challenges endure.

The Carter Center’s disease-eradication work occurs mostly in developing countries. But Jimmy and Roslaynn Carter were first exposed to river blindness growing up surrounded by the crushing poverty of the rural Deep South during the Great Depression.

The Center’s global democracy advocacy has reached countries that were still part of various European empires when Carter was born in 1924 or were under heavy American influence in the decades after World War II. Yet in recent years, Carter has declared his own country to be more of an “oligarchy” than a well-functioning democracy. And the Center has since become involved in monitoring and tracking U.S. elections.

Carter has lived long enough finally to have a genuine friend in the Oval Office again. President Joe Biden was a young Delaware politician in 1976 and became the first U.S. senator to endorse Carter’s campaign against better-known Washington figures. Now, as Biden seeks reelection in 2024, he faces the headwinds of inflation that Republicans openly compare to Carter’s economy. Biden had a wooden birthday cake display placed on the White House front law to honor Carter.

The year Carter was born, Congress passed sweeping immigration restrictions, sharply curtailing Ellis Island as a portal to the nation. Now, the naturalization ceremony to mark Carter’s 99th birthday comes as Washington continues a decades-long fight over immigration policy. Republicans, especially, have moved well to the right of Reagan, who in 1986 signed a sweeping amnesty policy for millions of immigrants who were in the country illegally or had no sure legal path to citizenship.

Carter also was born into Jim Crow segregation, at a time when the Ku Klux Klan marched openly on state capitols and in Washington. As governor and president, Carter set new marks for appointing Black Americans to top government posts. At 99, Carter’s Sunday online church circuit includes watching Georgia’s first Black U.S. senator, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, preach at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Yet, at the same time, some white state lawmakers in Carter’s native region are defying the U.S. Supreme Court in an effort to curtail Black voters’ strength at the ballot box.

Jason Carter said understanding his grandfather’s impact means resisting the urge to assess whether he solved every problem he confronted or won every election. Instead, he said, the takeaway is to recognize a sweeping impact rooted in respecting other people on an individual level and trying to help them.

“You don’t get more out of a life than he got, right?” the younger Carter said. “It is a incredible, full rich life with a long marriage, a wonderful partnership with my grandmother, and the ability to see the world and interact with the world in ways that almost nobody else has ever been able to do.”

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