Here are this week’s SWAJ Research Links, compiled by SWAJ Team Member Mark Kurth.
National Inquiries
Johnson shuts door on swift consideration of Senate border deal
Meanwhile, House conservatives, including Johnson, have warned that if they don’t believe the border reform efforts go far enough that the bill will be dead on arrival in their chamber. And there’s growing skepticism about more Ukraine aid within the House GOP conference, including a warning from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) that she could trigger a vote to try to oust Johnson if he put it up for a vote.
Moms for Liberty faces new challenges and growing pushback over its conservative education agenda
Jenkins believes the challenges are mounting for Moms for Liberty. “More and more people are voting against them,” she said. “Perception is power, and right now, they look weak.”
Before next Tuesday’s Brevard school board meeting, students, parents and teachers plan what organizers are calling “a rally against academic censorship.”
Students will speak out against removing books from schools, some banned titles will be distributed, and new voters will be registered to send a message to “Brevard’s rogue school board,” according to organizers.
“The longer that Moms for Liberty has been on the scene, the more we’ve seen local communities organize against them,” Schneider said. “Organized opponents often include coalitions of families, educators, and even students themselves – folks who are well positioned to counter baseless accusations, and who are themselves often quite compelling as voices for less politicized school governance.”
Nikki Haley walks back comment that Texas can secede from US
“No. According to the Constitution, they can’t,” Haley told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” when asked whether she thought the Lone Star State had a right to secede.
“What I do think they have the right to do is have the power to protect themselves and do all that. Texas has talked about seceding for a long time. The Constitution doesn’t allow for that,” she said. “But what I will say is … Where’s that coming from? That’s coming from the fact that people don’t think that government is listening to them.”
Her comments mark a turnaround from remarks she made last week, when Haley told radio host Charlemagne tha God that “if Texas decides they want to do that, they can do that.”
New York verdict against Trump not valid, J.D. Vance says
A former “Never Trumper,” Vance (R-Ohio) now fully backs the former president, who is originally from New York City. Trump was ordered to pay $83.3 million in damages to advice columnist Carroll and is the center of a myriad of cases set to play out this year amid his 2024 campaign.
Stephanopoulos pressed Vance as to whether he believed any verdicts by a group of average citizens in New York City could be fair. “Well, when the cases are funded by left-wing donors and when the case has absolute left-wing bias all over it, George, absolutely I think that we should call into question that particular conclusion,” he said.
Could evangelical Christian women hold the key to compromise on immigration reform?
"The Bible doesn’t have anything to say about U.S. immigration policy, but it does have a lot to say about the immigrant and the refugee," said Bri Stensrud, director of Women of Welcome, a community of more than 130,000 evangelical Christian women. Group members are, by and large, conservative, anti-abortion and trying to square the Republican Party's razor-wire immigration politics with the compassion that their faith demands of them.
The Supreme Court sure sounds eager to put Trump back on the ballot
In this case, Trump v. Anderson, the Colorado Supreme Court determined that Trump must be removed from its presidential ballot under a provision of the 14th Amendment that prohibits former high-ranking officials who engage in an “insurrection” from serving in office again.
The Court appears likely to rule that this decision was wrong because state courts, as opposed to federal courts or Congress, may not determine that a presidential candidate is ineligible. As Justice Elena Kagan, an Obama appointee, said at one point, the question of who can seek the highest federal office “sounds awfully national to me,” and thus should be resolved in a federal forum.
Most of the justices piled on with similar arguments. One leading concern, raised by several justices, is that there could be competing decisions reaching competing conclusions if each state is allowed to determine whether a candidate is ineligible for the presidency.
Democrats are nowhere to be seen ahead of 14th Amendment SCOTUS case
Not a single sitting Democratic member of Congress, governor, state attorney general or secretary of state filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court — submissions from parties not involved in the case to tell the court where they stand — advocating for Trump to be removed.
And there was no organized effort by Democrats on Capitol Hill to weigh in on the case. Individual members generally said they felt that the case had merit, but met the lack of party response with a shrug.
Democrats’ attempts to stay out of the 14th Amendment issue may be intended to avoid the appearance that they’re politicizing the law and the courts. But the potential disqualification of a leading presidential candidate is inherently a political and legal question, and Democrats’ comparative silence has been asymmetrical, with Republicans eager to jump into this fray in particular.
Tucker Carlson is in Russia to interview Putin. He’s already doing the bidding of the Kremlin
In a video posted to X announcing the sit-down Tuesday — the first interview Putin has granted with a Western media figure since his full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago — Carlson predictably and dishonestly villainized the press. The right-wing extremist, who has lauded autocrats in recent years, claimed English-speaking outlets are “corrupt” and “lie” to their audiences as they disseminate “propaganda of the ugliest kind.” (Projection much?)
As a supposed example of manipulative media behavior, Carlson accused journalists of engaging in “fawning pep sessions” when interviewing Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky, who the former Fox News host asserted he would like to earnestly sit down with, but once likened to a rat.
Senate Republicans threaten to block border security bill they negotiated
Donald Trump is demanding that Republicans sink the agreement, which they struck with Democrats and is now backed by President Joe Biden, as Trump, the likely 2024 Republican presidential nominee, seeks to wield immigration as a political weapon in the fall election. Trump tore into the bill on social media, calling it “nothing more than a highly sophisticated trap for Republicans to assume the blame on what the Radical Left Democrats have done to our Border, just in time for our most important EVER Election.”
The Supreme Court is about to decide whether to sabotage Trump’s election theft trial
On Tuesday, a federal appeals court handed down two widely anticipated documents rejecting a particularly unpersuasive legal argument by former President Donald Trump.
The first was a 57-page opinion rejecting Trump’s claim that he is immune from prosecution for his failed attempts to overthrow President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. Trump claimed he was immune because the president cannot be prosecuted for “official acts” he engages in while in office. But this argument borders on frivolousness, and it would have had astonishing implications if the courts actually bought it — which they did not.
The second, more important document that the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit handed down Tuesday is a single-page judgment that effectively lays out the schedule for resuming Trump’s federal prosecution for attempted election theft.
The Supreme Court Knows What It Must Do With Trump’s Immunity Ploy
The justices must now decide whether to halt the new ruling—an act that seems likely to push Trump’s criminal trial past the 2024 election—or allow proceedings at the trial court to move forward at a pace that might affect the election’s outcome. In theory, this call is purely procedural; in reality, due to the compressed timeline here, it may well determine Trump’s fate. If the former president persuades the justices to freeze the case before Judge Tanya Chutkan for months, then wins the election, he will undoubtedly exploit his office to scrap the prosecution. Once again, SCOTUS holds his fate in its hands. It does so on the very same week it will hear a different case about his removal from the ballot.
Takeaways from the scathing appeals court ruling denying immunity to Donald Trump
In a striking 57-page unanimous opinion, the panel of three DC Circuit judges wrote that that the justice system allowed for a former president to face charges for actions he took while in office, and that the public interest in holding a potentially criminal president accountable outweighed any potential “chilling effect” on the presidency.
“We cannot accept that the office of the Presidency places its former occupants above the law for all time thereafter,” the opinion says.
“Former President Trump lacked any lawful discretionary authority to defy federal criminal law and he is answerable in court for his conduct,” the judges added.
Trump has pledged to appeal and has until Monday to ask the Supreme Court to temporarily block the ruling to delay his case again from heading to trial.
House GOP fails to impeach Mayorkas over border handling
The articles of impeachment against the Homeland Security secretary failed in an 214-216 vote, after four Republicans sided with Democrats to oppose recommending Mayorkas be booted from office. But Republican lawmakers quickly predicted they will bring it back up once Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who is undergoing treatment for blood cancer, returns.
How a botched impeachment laid bare a GOP House that cannot function
The failure played into the hands of a White House that delights in portraying Johnson’s majority as an engine for Donald Trump’s political stunts more than a serious governing force. And it raised serious doubts over the GOP’s capacity to pull off another politized maneuver designed to please the former president – an impeachment of President Joe Biden.
The malpractice of Johnson’s impeachment team was encapsulated by Democrats outmaneuvering them to bring a shoeless Rep. Al Green, who was recovering from surgery, to the chamber in a wheelchair to cast a dramatic vote.
Moments after the Mayorkas impeachment failed, Johnson was also unable to pass a standalone bill containing billions of dollars in aid for Israel. It was another busted gambit to jam the Biden administration. The president had threatened to veto the bill in protest of Johnson’s refusal to hold votes on a broader package that also included aid to Ukraine and Taiwan. The speaker said Biden and Democrats should be “ashamed” of failing to support an ally embroiled in a war. But the double failure on the House floor did more to highlight his own deficiencies than discomfort Biden.
States Fights
A South Dakota tribe banned Gov. Kristi Noem from a reservation over her US-Mexico border remarks
A South Dakota tribe has banned Republican Gov. Kristi Noem from the Pine Ridge Reservation after she spoke this week about wanting to send razor wire and security personnel to Texas to help deter immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border and also said cartels are infiltrating the state’s reservations.
“Due to the safety of the Oyate, effective immediately, you are hereby Banished from the homelands of the Oglala Sioux Tribe!” Tribe President Frank Star Comes Out said in a Friday statement addressed to Noem. “Oyate” is a word for people or nation.
Star Comes Out accused Noem of trying to use the border issue to help get former U.S. President Donald Trump re-elected and boost her chances of becoming his running mate.