The 5-Minute Fix: A race you should watch: Pennsylvania’s special election

March 13, 2018

Democracy Dies in Darkness

Keeping up with politics is easy now

By Amber Phillips

Everyone in Washington's talking about a special congressional election happening Tuesday outside Pittsburgh, and with good reason. We'll probably get our first real glimpse of whether Democrats have a shot at taking back the House of Representatives in November. Here's what you need to know.

What's the deal: Earlier this year, Republican Tim Murphy resigned amid an alleged sexual scandal. That set up Tuesday's special election to replace him.

What wasn't supposed to be a competitive race suddenly is; polls show leads constantly swapping between Democrat Conor Lamb and Republican Rick Saccone.

Democrat Conor Lamb (Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)

Why this race matters: If Lamb, the Democrat, can even come close to winning, he'll have done it with the support of Trump voters. The mostly white, blue-collar southwestern Pittsburgh area district is more conservative than the kind of congressional district that Democrats need to win to take back the House. President Trump actually won this district in 2016 by 20 points. A Democratic victory or almost-victory will rightly set off alarm bells among Republicans about how voters feel about their party.

Trump campaigned with Republican Rick Saccone, left, Saturday. (Keith Srakocic/AP)

One word of caution: Democrats need to pick up a net 24 seats in November to take back control of the House. (Well, 23 if they win Tuesday.) Whatever happens Tuesday doesn't guarantee a thing come November. That's eight months from now, which is a century in political years. A lot about the national mood can change between now and then, in Democrats' or Republicans' favor.

Trump is still being haunted by Stormy Daniels

President Trump and Stormy Daniels (AP)

The porn star alleging that Trump had an affair with her a decade ago and paid her hush money to stay quiet about it before the election has now upped the ante: She's given an interview to CBS's "60 Minutes,” one of the most venerable news programs on TV. That could bring her story even further into the mainstream. (The interview hasn't been scheduled to air yet.)

BuzzFeed reports that Trump's lawyers might try to stop CBS from broadcasting her interview. But The Fix's Callum Borchers surveyed legal experts who unanimously said it's too late for him to block the interview.

That's because for the government to successfully restrain programming for a TV news broadcast, Trump would have to do one of two things:

1. Get CBS to sign something like a nondisclosure agreement.(Daniels is blasting through the one she says she signed with Trump, asking a court to invalidate it because Trump never signed it.)

2. Convince the court there is a clear case of immediate, irreparable harm to the U.S. if Daniels speaks on TV. That's a very high bar. In the 1970s, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the New York Times and The Washington Post to publish classified documents related to U.S. military actions in Vietnam.

(For you young 'uns, there's a movie about it.)

Scenes from “The Post.” (Niko Tavernise/Twentieth Century Fox via AP)

Point is that the courts sided with the journalists over the government. Lata Nott, director of the Newseum Institute's First Amendment Center, told Borchers: “If the Pentagon Papers didn't meet that standard, can't imagine that this '60 Minutes' segment with Stormy Daniels would.”

What's up with Betsy DeVos?

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in September (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)

Speaking of "60 Minutes,” Trump's education secretary recently gave an interview to the show that was painfully awkward. She seemed unprepared and at times flat-out uninformed. Her interview aired Sunday night, and it's still the talk of the town here in Washington, because she said stuff like this:

She acknowledged not having visited an underperforming public school yet. (“Maybe I should.")
She said she didn't know if sexual assault and false accusations are comparable.
She had no defense for why, if her champion cause of using public school funding for charter schools is so great, her home state of Michigan hasn't shown education improvements with the rise of charter schools. (“Overall I can't say they've gotten better,” she said of public schools in Michigan.)

The White House is reportedly dismayed at her performance. But maybe this shouldn't have come as a surprise.

In her confirmation hearing last year before the Senate, DeVos didn't seem to understand basic laws and defended guns in schools because some rural schools might — I'm not making this up — need it “to protect from potential grizzlies.”