Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) submitted a letter to The Wall Street Journal on Thursday in response to an editorial on judicial nominee Thomas Farr this week that argued Democrats should stop calling racism to advance their agenda.

Scott agreed that while a nominee’s history “should be seen through a wider lens, the solution isn’t simply to decry ‘racial attacks.'”

“Instead, we should stop bringing candidates with questionable track records on race before the full Senate for a vote,” he wrote. “What this means, regardless of the obvious issues the Democratic Party has on race, is that the Republican Party must strive to do better. We can build on the momentum of opportunity zones and criminal-justice reform to show we are serious about tackling real issues facing people of color. I know conservative solutions can transform lives, but if folks don’t trust us, implementing those solutions becomes impossible.”

The sentencing memo that special counsel Robert Mueller filed Monday for Michael Flynn marked the first time in public filings that Mueller referenced a U.S.-based Turkish cleric who was the target of a kidnapping plot that the former National Security Advisor allegedly discussed with Turkish officials in 2016.

“The defendant’s false statements impeded the ability of the public to learn about the Republic of Turkey’s efforts to influence public opinion about the failed coup, including its efforts to effectuate the removal of a person legally residing in the United States,” Mueller’s filing said.

West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice appointed Jill Upson, chairwoman of a PAC called Black Americans for the President’s Agenda, to head West Virginia’s Herbert Henderson Office of Minority Affairs just months after her organization ran a racist ad about Democrats lynching black men.

The ad, which ran in late October for Rep. French Hill (R-AK), featured two seemingly black women discussing the likelihood that white Democrats would start lynching black men as part of the #MeToo movement.

Both Hill and Upson denounced the ad — Upson tried to wash her hands of any responsibility. “Upon listening to the ad last night, I contacted the organization’s founder and demanded that it be removed from the air and no longer played,” she wrote in a Facebook post. However, her words seemed to have had no effect on the playing of the ads.

Late this summer, it seemed almost inevitable that Michigan would be one of a handful of states this election cycle to pass ballot initiatives to increase the minimum wage and require paid sick leave. Both proposals received more than the required number of signatures to get on the ballot. But in early September, the state Legislature preempted the ballot measures and adopted the proposals. What would have seemed like a win for organizers quickly brought concern. Advocates feared that the Republican-controlled state Legislature had only made the decision so it could gut those new laws in the lame-duck session following the election.

And they were right. With just weeks before their majority dwindles in the state’s House and Senate and Michigan’s Republican Gov. Rick Snyder is replaced by Democrat Gretchen Whitmer, the GOP-stacked Legislature is rushing to rewrite the laws it previously adopted. Less than a week after a set of weakened versions of the minimum wage and paid sick leave laws passed the Senate, the House passed them late Tuesday evening as protests from the gallery echoed through the chamber. The bills now just await Snyder’s signature.

California’s historic wildfires, combined with the climate denial views of one Republican incumbent, appear to have helped sway voters in the state to elect a Democrat in a longtime conservative congressional district during the midterm elections, new analysis shows.

On November 6, real estate developer Harley Rouda (D) defeated Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), a 15-term incumbent, to represent the 48th congressional district of California, which stretches along the Pacific coastline of Orange County from Seal Beach to Laguna Beach.

For the survey, voters in the district were asked questions about the election and the impact of the advertisement, titled “Fire & Smoke.” The script of the advertisement focused on wildfires and climate change:

While it gets hotter and fire and smoke choke our air, Dana Rohrabacher is radically opposed to efforts to fight climate change. He says that “global warming is a fraud.” Rohrabacher sided with fossil fuel companies and voted against a plan to reduce carbon dioxide pollution, saying they don’t hurt people’s health.

More than two thirds of voters in the district — including 71 percent of swing voters — recall having seen the climate advertisement.

The respondents cited Rohrabacher’s stance on climate change as a main reason for their opposition, along with his ties to Putin’s Russia, his opposition to the Affordable Care Act, the presidency of fellow Republican Donald Trump, and Rohrabacher’s 30-year tenure in Congress.

Though the Federal Communications Commission on Monday denied reporters’ requests for records relating to millions of public comments submitted last year about net neutrality, Chairman Ajit Pai made a surprising claim in justifying his decision: The Russians did it.

The FCC’s net neutrality decision-making process has been subject to scrutiny for months. Pai falsely claimed last year that the FCC’s public comment system had been the victim of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. In reality, according to an inspector general’s report, there were no such attacks, just a massive wave of comments, many due to a segment calling for public comments by HBO’s John Oliver.

Near the end of his statement justifying not releasing the comment data, Pai referred to a dissenting Democratic colleague on the commission, Jessica Rosenworcel, and noted “the fact that the half-million comments submitted from Russian e-mail addresses and the nearly eight million comments filed by e-mail addresses from e-mail domains associated with FakeMailGenerator.com supported her position on the issue!”

Even after a court called such a scheme unconstitutional, the GOP-controlled North Carolina legislature will try again to design county election boards to guarantee that Republicans have the chair in election years.

The new legislation would, in odd-numbered years, make the chair a board member who is from “the political party with the highest number of registered affiliates,” which are the Democrats in North Carolina. In even years, when statewide elections are held, the chair would be a board member who is from “political party with the second highest number of registered affiliates,” i.e. the GOP, under the legislation.

Comedians and the Federal Communications Commission have not always been the best of friends. But the conflict between HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and the agency in charge of regulating the nation’s communications sector had nothing to do with the seven dirty words. Instead, it all started when Oliver told viewers to submit comments to the agency in an effort to revive net neutrality. The next day, the FCC claimed that an onslaught of comments following the segment had overwhelmed the agency’s comment system and had caused it to crash. The agency’s then-Chief Information Officer David Bray determined the large volume of comments had been the work of bots, the result of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, despite having experienced similar outages in 2014 after a different segment where Oliver urged his viewers to write the agency.

The problem? The alleged DDoS never happened. Over a year later, after an internal investigation into the matter was made public, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai admitted to Congress that the initial report that bots were responsible had been wrong; the system crashed because it couldn’t handle the number of authentic comments inspired by Oliver’s segment. After months of accusations from the press and lawmakers that the FCC had deceived the public about the attack, an answer was reached. But net neutrality was already dead. According to the agency’s own inspector general, the “FCC made several specific statements that we believe misrepresent facts about the event or provide misleading information [to Congress].”