(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden is wrapping up a three-day Pennsylvania campaign swing in Philadelphia on Thursday with an endorsement by 15 members of the politically famous Kennedy family — a counter to the political threat from RFK Jr.

In speech excerpts released by the Biden campaign from Kerry Kennedy, a daughter of former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, she will say another Donald Trump presidency would “horrify” her father.

“We can say today, with no less urgency, that our rights and freedoms are once again in peril,” Kennedy is expected to say. “That is why we all need to come together in a campaign that should unite not only Democrats, but all Americans, including Republicans, and independents, who believe in what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature.”

She along with several of her family members have denounced her brother Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s bid for president. The Independent candidate, who officially launched his presidential bid last fall is famously known for espousing conspiracy theories about the efficacy of vaccines.

The endorsement comes as no real surprise. Although he is the fourth Kennedy to run for president, RFK Jr. is the only one to have broken from the Democratic Party. Many of his relatives, like Kerry Kennedy, argue that not only is his run an “embarrassment” but that it could swing a close race in Trump’s come November.

“I’ve listened to him, I know him, I have no idea why anyone thinks he should be president,” Jack Scholossberg, the grandson of John F. Kennedy, said in a video on Instagram last summer. “What I do know is his candidacy is an embarrassment.”

Rory Kennedy, RFK Jr.’s sister, told ABC’s Good Morning America a couple of weeks ago that she’s “concerned” voting for her brother will “take votes away from Biden and lead to a Trump election.”

Realistically the candidate, who is currently polling at 7%, according to 538’s average, has a longshot path to getting into the White House. Although his campaign has claimed he has enough signatures to appear on the ballots of eight states, including battleground states North Carolina and Nevada, only Utah has confirmed that he has qualified.

But in a race that is expected to see small margin wins, any votes siphoned away from the president could lead to another Trump presidency.

Biden, who has a close friendship with the Kennedy family, has steered away from commenting on RFK Jr.’s bid, but in a show of force against the candidate, the Democratic National Committee has hired a communications team to combat the legitimacy of Kennedy.

They’ve filed a federal complaint alleging RFK Jr.’s super PAC is working too closely with his campaign. And on a call with reporters in March, DNC surrogates called him “dangerous” and a “spoiler.”

“A vote for Joe Biden is a vote to save our democracy and our decency. It is a vote for what my father called for, in his own presidential announcement in 1968,” Kerry Kennedy is expected to say at Thursday’s announcement. “Our right to the moral leadership of this planet.”

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(GRANTS PASS, Ore.) — Just past the outfield fence of the local little league ballpark, homeless residents of this sleepy Oregon town erect tents to spend the night protected from cold and rain.

“It’s public access, plain and simple,” said Brandon, 38, a Grants Pass native who says the death of his wife three years ago plunged him into a financial crisis that cost him a permanent home.

The city, seeing a menace in its parks, wants unhoused residents like Brandon prohibited from camping on public land.

“When kids practice on that field and there’s needles and stuff like that,” said local state representative Dwayne Younker, “is it safe to have a kid play in the park where there’s a tent 20 feet away? I don’t know what the people in the tent are doing.”

A debate over homeless encampments familiar to many communities heads to the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, where the justices will confront a rising tide of unhoused Americans and punitive steps cities like Grants Pass are increasingly taking to address it.

In 2013, the Grants Pass city council attempted to ban anyone “from using a blanket, pillow or cardboard box for protection from the elements” while sleeping outside under threat of civil citation.

Two federal courts put the measure on hold after finding it “cruel and unusual punishment” under the Eighth Amendment to ticket people with no alternative to survive.

“Involuntarily homeless people are punished for engaging in the unavoidable acts of sleeping or resting in a public place when they have nowhere else to go,” a district court concluded in 2020.

There are no public homeless shelters in Grants Pass, which has a population of nearly 40,000. An estimated 600 residents are experiencing homelessness.

“We all want to solve homelessness, but criminalizing our neighbors who’ve been forced to live outside is not the way to do it. It will not work; it will make matters worse,” said attorney Ed Johnson at the Oregon Law Center, which represents a group of Grants Pass homeless residents.

In City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, the nation’s highest court is being asked to decide whether ticketing homeless people is patently unconstitutional — the most significant legal dispute over homelessness in America in more than 40 years.

“This case is about giving cities the tools that they need to address the urgent homelessness crisis,” said Theane Evangelis, an attorney representing the city before the Supreme Court. “We believe that it’s cruel to allow these conditions to continue, and that cities need to have the flexibility to address all of the circumstances as they work on long term solutions to homelessness.”

The case also has sweeping implications for those living on the streets, advocates say.

“The stakes are really high,” said Ann Olivia, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. “What the data tells us, what the evidence tells us, what our humanity tells us, is that moving people around because you don’t want to see them is not the answer.”

Soaring home and rent prices have eaten into incomes and priced some people out of the market. The situation has been compounded by sunsetting COVID relief programs; an ongoing mental health and drug abuse crisis; and, an aging population without retirement savings.

Adding to that financial burden — and giving some people a criminal record — by ticketing them for camping is counterproductive, homeless advocates contend.

“The reality is, the only thing that works is more permanent affordable housing,” said Johnson. “If we prevail in this case, our homeless problem is still going to be there. It just means that we can’t criminalize people while they’re homeless.”

Helen Cruz, an unhoused Grants Pass native, knows the indignity first hand. Over five years living in city parks before a nearby church took her in, she says she received more than $5,000 in camping related fines.

“I was holding down two jobs when I was out here, and it’s still not enough to be able to rent a place,” she said. “The terms of low income housing here is $1,000 a month, and that’s not workable either.”

Still, from Phoenix, to Los Angeles, to Seattle, city leaders and law enforcement groups — members of both political parties — have joined Grants Pass in urging the justices to make it easier to clear tent encampments from the streets.

“Cities need to have these ordinances so that they can help incentivize people to accept offers of help,” Evangelis said. “That’s what these laws do.”

In its brief to the high court, Grants Pass says lower courts created “a judicial roadblock preventing a comprehensive response to the growth of public encampments in the West” and that the situation threatens “crime, fires, the reemergence of medieval disease, environmental harm, and record levels of drug overdoses and deaths on public streets.”

“The cities are saying they don’t have clarity on this issue,” said Austin VanDerHeyden, a municipal affairs analyst with the Goldwater Institute. “It’s more ‘cruel and unusual’ to punish someone the way they are currently existing — the way that they’re being forced to live on the street currently is not compassionate.”

Grants Pass Police Chief Warren Hensman said many law enforcement agencies feel caught in the middle and need to be able to enforce the law.

“We have community members in Grants Pass that are afraid to come their parks. We’ve had shootings in our parks. We have fights in our parks, chronic drug abuse in our parks. So much of our citizenry are not walking through our parks,” he said.

“The problem is much more than the police department. It’s much more than a city. It’s really a state and national problem to come together and work on,” he said.

Some social service providers say local ordinances like a camping ban would provide incentive to homeless people to take advantage of existing resources.

“The big question is, is there nowhere else to go? Or Is there just nowhere else that they want to go?” said Brian Bouteller, director of Grants Pass Gospel Rescue Mission, the only private homeless shelter in town, which has provided warm beds and meals to the needy for more than 40 years.

The facility — which has 78 beds to house homeless men — is only half full.

“We’ve seen a drop in our residency, and we’ve seen an increase in people in our parks and freeway underpasses and that kind of stuff in places where they ought not be,” because the courts put the camping ban on hold, he said.

The Supreme Court’s decision, which is expected by the end of June, is expected to lay out guidelines for how cities can regulate homeless encampments going forward.

Helen Cruz and Brandon say, for them, a lot is on the line.

“If I don’t feel like I belong, I’m going to feel like an outsider, and then I’m going to want to continue doing the same thing,” said Brandon as he erected his tent in centerfield of Morrison Park, “because there’s no reason to thrive for anything different.”

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(WASHINGTON) — The little-seen, $19,000 lectern at the center of a controversy in Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ office was made available for viewing on Tuesday night — after a monthslong audit into how the lectern was procured and paid for found that Sanders’ staff potentially violated several state laws.

The governor’s office responded by characterizing the investigation as “a waste of taxpayer resources and time” and called the audit report “deeply flawed.”

“The facts outlined in the report demonstrate what the governor’s office said all along: we followed the law, and the state was fully reimbursed with private funds for the podium, at no cost to the taxpayers,” Sanders’ spokesperson Alexa Henning said in a statement.

A Republican state senator had requested the probe last year after the lectern’s high price tag sparked scrutiny and captured the national spotlight, including a jab from late-night host Jimmy Kimmel.

The purchase only came to light when Matt Campbell, a Little Rock attorney and progressive blogger, called attention to Sanders’ office using a state-issued credit card in June 2023 to make a $19,029.25 payment to Beckett Events, a boutique event planning company whose owners are close with the governor.

Lawmakers questioned Sanders’ staff about the audit’s findings in a nearly three-hour hearing at the state Capitol on Tuesday, after the report was sent Monday to prosecuting attorneys.

“I was really hoping that you all would have brought the lectern with you today so we could see it,” Republican state Rep. Julie Mayberry said at that hearing. “We all can agree that $19,000 was spent on an item and no one has really seen it.”

Sanders’ deputy chief of staff, Judd Deere, told lawmakers that she plans to use the lectern now that the audit is complete, previously having not wanted it to be a distraction.

Despite seven “areas of noncompliance” identified in the audit report where the governor’s office potentially violated state laws regarding purchasing, state property and government records, Deere also said no members of the governor’s staff were disciplined for their actions — “nor should they be,” he added.

What’s next then for the dispute also known as #LecternGate?

Arkansas’ Attorney General Tim Griffin, a Republican, has already indicated he won’t pursue charges — enraging critics — when last week he said that state purchasing laws don’t apply to the governor or other executive branch officials, only to state agencies.

That means the potential for any criminal charges to be filed would likely fall to Will Jones, the 6th Judicial District prosecuting attorney in Little Rock.

Jones said his office is assessing the audit and that their “review is no different than any other file review” sent to them.

Sanders, a former Trump White House official and daughter of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, has been seen as a rising star in the Republican Party.

She was defiant in dismissing the findings, posting a 20-second video edit of the lectern to social media this week that said “COME AND TAKE IT.”

Here are key takeaways from the audit:

Potential violations include tampering with public records

Auditors identified seven “areas of potential noncompliance with state law” that the governor’s office engaged in — including a member of the governor’s office staff shredding the bill of lading for the lectern, which contained details of the shipment and was attached to the delivery crate, potentially violating document retention laws.

They were told in interviews that the shredding was inadvertent.

Auditors also reported that, at the direction of the governor’s deputy chief of staff, an executive assistant added handwritten notes that read “to be reimbursed” on two invoices after Campbell, the blogger, asked for documents surrounding the lectern’s purchase in a Freedom of Information Act request. State Republicans ultimately repaid the cost of the lectern — after Campbell called attention to it.

According to the audit, other potential violations of budgeting and accounting laws include the purchase being applied to operating expenses, though state law prevents equipment that must be capitalized from being expensed, as well as the lectern being paid for before it was delivered.

The governor’s office further failed to notify a state agency of the lectern’s delivery, as required, and did not create a business expense justification statement on the day it was purchased.

Sanders has previously maintained that the lectern’s purchase “went through standard protocol in our office.”

Lectern has no electronic components, despite special features touted

When Sanders came under fire last fall for the lectern’s price tag, relative to other such furniture and equipment, she told reporters it was custom made for her height, was designed “to get the best sound quality” and that it incorporated components to allow multiple media outlets to plug in at the same time.

Auditors reported the lectern features no microphone or any electronic elements.

It does include a light, they said.

The report included a breakdown of the total cost as follows: $11,575 for the lectern itself, $2,500 for a consulting fee, $2,200 for a travel case, $1,225 for freight shipping for the lectern, $975 for freight shipping for the travel case and $554 for a credit card processing fee.

The $2,500 consulting fee had not been previously reported but attracted scrutiny on social media when coupled with a detail from the report that the governor’s office was considering returning the lectern shortly after its delivery because its height did not meet order specifications.

The total $19,000 cost for the podium is notably higher than could be purchased via standard retail means. One retailer previously wrote online that their own lecterns sell for around $7,000. And two political sources outside of Sanders’ office with experience producing podiums and the costs associated with them has told ABC News that $19,029.25 is more than they would have charged or spent on the procurement.

Sanders herself didn’t participate in the audit, nor did the lectern’s vendors

Neither Sanders, who previously said she welcomed the audit, nor the lectern vendors cooperated with the probe, according to the audit report.

Virginia Beckett and Hannah Stone of Beckett Events did not respond to repeated attempts from auditors to contact them via telephone, certified mail and email, the report said, nor did New York-based Miller’s Presentation Furniture, which manufactured the lectern, according to the audit.

Beckett and Stone were previously hired by Sanders’ office to help with advance planning on her gubernatorial inauguration and the 2023 GOP response to the State of the Union address. They were also at the Paris Air Show last June, which Sanders also attended, the same month the lectern was purchased.

Auditors recruited Sanders’ office for help reaching out to the vendors during their investigation. Chief legal counsel for the governor’s office told lawmakers Tuesday she sent two emails to Beckett Events.

Moving forward, an aide to the governor said Tuesday that she doesn’t plan on using the vendors again.

Neither of the vendors immediately responded to ABC News’ request for comment.

No evidence state party planned to reimburse state before FOIA request

Only after Campbell sought additional information about the five-figure purchase with taxpayer dollars was it reimbursed by the state’s Republican Party, with auditors reporting “there was no indication the governor’s office was seeking reimbursement for the cost of the podium and the road case” before the requests.

Sanders’ spokesperson said last fall that use of a state credit card for the purchase was “an accounting error.”

The governor’s deputy chief of staff, however, told lawmakers Tuesday that it was decided later on it would be “preferable” for the lectern to be paid for with private funds via the state Republican Party.

“This body appropriated money that was available for us to use to purchase items. Later on we determined it was preferable that private funds the governor raised be used to reimburse the state,” Deere said. “No taxpayer has been used to purchase this item. So we do not view it as a mistake.”

Notably, the governor’s office had also sought approval before the lectern purchase to increase the state credit card’s spending limit, as opposed to having the Arkansas Republican Party make the purchase themselves.

Campbell, in a statement to ABC News, applauded the auditors’ work which he said proved “what we already knew: that the lectern purchase was illegal and done in the shadiest way imaginable.”

The audit also determined, because of broken protocols, that the lectern belongs to the state of Arkansas.

One Arkansas vendor contacted and quoted a far lower lectern price

Staffers in Sanders’ office told auditors they “could not recall any other quotes being obtained” for the lectern.

However, auditors found that in March 2023, a staff member contacted an Arkansas-based audio and visual equipment dealer and received quotes for podiums up to $1,500, lighting systems up to $1,000 and sound systems up to $3,000.

While auditors said they were ultimately unable to determine the reasonableness of the cost of the podium due to the “custom specifications,” “lack of vendor responses” and “lack of documentation,” they hinted at its high price when compared to similar-style lecterns on the market.

“It should be noted that similar non-customized falcon style podiums can be purchased from online vendors starting at approximately $7,000, as opposed to the $11,575 amount allocated to the custom falcon podium,” the report said.

Arkansas lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have expressed doubt about the lectern’s value.

“I don’t think the lectern’s worth $19,000 or $11,500,” Republican state Sen. John Payton said on Tuesday. “But I do think the lesson learned could be worth far more than that if we would just accept the fact that it was bad judgment and it was carelessness.”

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