Here are this week’s SWAJ Research Links, compiled by SWAJ Team Member Mark Kurth.
National Inquiries
Biden's told Israel to 'operate by the rules of war.' But a ground invasion is bloody, fraught and expensive
How the fighting is expected to unfold, why Gaza is so dangerous for civilians and combatants, and what’s at stake for the tens of thousands of U.S. troops stationed in the Middle East are topics of discussion at the highest levels. The stakes are high for President Joe Biden: he has a historic $100 billion funding request tied up in Congress, he's trying to avoid a conflagration that embroils U.S. troops. Not to mention, the fate of the 2024 election; where Americans are more worried about the economy and how being engulfed in a new proxy war could affect them.
Before he became a politician, House Speaker Mike Johnson partnered with an anti-gay conversion therapy group
Prior to launching his political career, Johnson, a lawyer, gave legal advice to an organization called Exodus International and partnered with the group to put on an annual anti-gay event aimed at teens, according to a CNN KFile review of more than a dozen of Johnson’s media appearances from that timespan.
Founded in 1976, Exodus International was a leader in the so-called “ex-gay” movement, which aimed to make gay individuals straight through conversion therapy programs using religious and counseling methods. Exodus International connected ministries across the world using these controversial approaches.
Trump and company saved $168 million in loan interest as a result of fraud, banking expert testifies
McCarty calculated the difference in interest payments that Trump might have paid with a commercial real estate loan that would have had a much higher interest rate than the rate he obtained by personally guaranteeing the loans on the basis of financial statements that inflated his net worth.
He determined the Trump Organization saved on interest for the properties:
$72,908,308 for the Doral Resort;
$53,423,209 for the Old Post Office loan;
$17,443,359 for Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago;
and $24,265,291 for 40 Wall Street.
The Most Controversial Statue in America Surrenders to the Furnace
Last Saturday in a small foundry, a man in heat-resistant attire pulled down his gold-plated visor, turned on his plasma torch and sliced into the face of Robert E. Lee. The hollow bronze head glowed green and purple as the flame burned through layers of patina and wax. Drops of molten red metal cascaded to the ground.
I stood next to Andrea Douglas and Jalane Schmidt, who had invited me to witness the last moments of the figure that had gazed down on Charlottesville, Va., from atop a massive steed from 1924, when it was installed, until 2021, when it was removed by the City Council. Dr. Douglas and Dr. Schmidt are the founders of the Swords Into Plowshares project, a community group that led a campaign to melt the statue down and use the metal to make a new public artwork.
Mike Johnson Urged a Religious Test for Politicians
You better sit down any candidate who says they’re going to run for legislature and say, “I want to know what your worldview is. I want to know what, to know what you think about the Christian heritage of this country. I want to know what you think about God’s design for society. Have you even thought about that?” If they hadn’t thought about it, you need to move on and find somebody who has…We have too many people in government who don’t know any of this stuff. They haven’t even thought about it.
This remark came after Kelly and Mike had repeatedly asserted that the Christian fundamentalist worldview—based entirely on what appears in the Old and New Testaments—is the only legitimate worldview.
Johnson was telling the folks in the pews that the only political candidates deserving support are those who share this worldview and who embrace the notion that the United States has been a Christian nation. This smacks of Christian nationalism and appears to be a religious test for politics.
These Americans are ambivalent about democracy
A full two-thirds, 67%, of all likely Republican primary voters in South Carolina said Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, if true, are not relevant to his fitness for the presidency.
The figure pops up to 92% of the voters who currently back Trump. That’s the vast majority of Trump supporters, at least in South Carolina at this moment.
It is possible that among these particular primary voters in South Carolina, they are unwilling or incapable of entertaining a key part of the question – the stipulation that Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election is true.
A national poll conducted for CNN by SSRS and released in September generated generally similar results.
The ultimate implication is that Trump’s supporters don’t necessarily care if he tried to subvert the election and are, at best, ambivalent about the idea of democracy.
Gaza residents raid food warehouses as ‘civil order’ disintegrates, UN says
Thousands of people in Gaza pillaged wheat, flour and other food supplies from United Nations warehouses, a U.N. agency said on Sunday, warning that “civil order” was starting to disintegrate in the besieged enclave.
The House's new MAGA speaker was a final humiliation for the GOP's 'moderates
Last week, every Republican in the House voted for a man The New York Times described as “the most important architect” of the attempt to overthrow Donald Trump’s 2020 electoral defeat.
And yet, for a few naive days, it appeared that the center might actually hold.
Democrats plan to subpoena wealthy benefactors of Supreme Court justices
Senate Judiciary Committee leaders said they would vote as soon as Nov. 9 to authorize subpoenas for information from Texas billionaire Harlan Crow, a close friend and benefactor of Justice Clarence Thomas, and from Leonard Leo, the conservative judicial activist. Senate Democrats do not need the vote of any Republican on the committee to authorize the subpoenas. No separate vote by the full Senate is necessary.
In his first act, Speaker Mike Johnson uses Israel aid to pick a fight with Joe Biden
A new bill House Republicans released Monday includes $14.3 billion in emergency funding for Israel while rescinding the same amount of IRS funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, a major climate, health care and tax law Biden signed last year.
The new GOP bill is slated for consideration by the Rules Committee when the House returns Wednesday, with a vote in the full chamber expected as early as this week.
If the bill passes the GOP-controlled House, the IRS provisions are all but guaranteed to be rejected by the Democratic-led Senate and White House, setting up a clash over how to approve Israel aid. It represents an early test for Johnson on navigating the demands of Republican hard-liners with the realities of divided government.
Takeaways from Day 1 of the Trump disqualification trial in Colorado
In a Denver courtroom, Trump’s lawyers clashed with the challengers, bashing their case as an “anti-democratic” end-around to derail Trump’s campaign without giving voters a say. The challengers argued that their litigation was an unfortunate but necessary step to ensure a “fair” 2024 election by keeping an ineligible candidate off the ballot.
In addition to opening statements, a US Capitol Police officer who was on the front lines of the violent assault and Rep. Eric Swalwell, a Democrat who recounted the horrors of running from the pro-Trump mob, testified for the challengers.
Mike Johnson symbolizes a new turn for the religious right
But Johnson, an evangelical himself, has been a virulent warrior for conservative cultural causes throughout his career, and has closely identified with far-right Christian nationalists seeking to tear down the separation of church and state. Johnson himself has declared, “The founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around.” His rise to leadership underscores the links in the Trump-era GOP between hostility to social and cultural change and the belief that the founders intended America to operate as an explicitly Christian nation.
From ‘Very Based’ to ‘Out of Context’: William Wolfe Attacks Right Wing Watch for Exposing His Radical Views
While Wolfe now claims that he was merely talking about Christians needing to take up in arms in self-defense and was not advocating for “proactive measures,” that doesn’t make his comments any less alarming, dangerous, or outrageous, as many of his fellow Christians have pointed out on social media.
And the fact remains that Wolfe’s initial response to our effort to publicize his views was to stand by them and thank us for helping to promote them. It was only when his fellow Christians also found his comments to be alarming, dangerous, and outrageous that he attempted to defend himself by attacking Right Wing Watch for daring to accurately report what he had said.
Does Speaker of the House Mike Johnson really believe in religious freedom?
Rusyn is also part of a 10-member delegation of Ukrainian clergy — Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim — who have come to Washington in hopes of impressing upon policymakers the threat that Russia’s invasion of their country poses for religious freedom in a nation where pluralism has thrived.
Among those who declined their request to meet, according to organizers for the delegation, was the new House speaker, Mike Johnson (R-La.), who claims his own evangelical faith “informs everything I do.” His work as a lawyer before being elected to Congress, Johnson has said, put him on “the front lines of the ‘culture war’ defending religious freedom.”
But when it comes to an actual war to defend religious freedom, not so much. While regularly offering prayers for Ukraine, Johnson in May was one of 57 lawmakers — all of them Republicans — who voted against a $39.8 billion aid package for Ukraine. At the time, he told the Shreveport Times that this country had more urgent priorities at home. As speaker, he has opposed the Biden administration’s request to include money for Ukraine in a funding bill to address what Johnson described as Israel’s “pressing and urgent need.”
FBI director: Antisemitism reaching ‘historic level’ in US
“This is a threat that is reaching, in some way, sort of historic levels,” Wray said during a Senate hearing Tuesday. The FBI director said that was in part because “the Jewish community is targeted by terrorists really across the spectrum” including homegrown violent extremists, foreign terrorist organizations, and domestic violent extremists.
“In fact, our statistics would indicate that for a group that represents only about 2.4% of the American public, they account for something like 60% of all religious-based hate crimes,” Wray said of the Jewish American population.
Takeaways from Day 3 of the Trump disqualification trial in Colorado
Indiana University law professor Gerard Magliocca has studied the 14th Amendment long before the 2020 election – including the congressional debate over its language, Justice Department memos about how the ban was applied during Reconstruction, and subsequent court cases on disqualification.
He has previously said he believes Trump is disqualified because of January 6. On the witness stand, he said the 14thAmendment was meant to apply expansively, including against presidents, and has been enforced by state courts. This rebuts some of the key defenses put forward by Trump’s lawyers.
Legal fight over gender-affirming care reaches the Supreme Court. Here's what's next.
"Tennessee and 20 other states have banned these treatments altogether, forcing families to upend their lives and move out of state to ensure that their children get the medical treatment they need," the families said in their appeal.
The families sued in April, arguing Tennessee's law violates the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment. They rely in part on a landmark Supreme Court decision from 2020 that barred workplace discrimination against LGBTQ+ employees, which held that discrimination based on a person's gender identity is a form of sex discrimination.
States Fights
Abortion referendum offers Ohio Democrats a playbook for ’24
They’re knocking on doors and phone banking in contested districts, speaking at rallies and in interviews in favor of the amendment, and attacking their GOP opponents for defending the state’s six-week abortion ban. The endangered candidates, and the Ohio Democratic Party fighting for their survival, are betting that supporting abortion rights in 2023 will position them for victory in 2024 as it has for many other swing state Democrats since Roe v. Wade fell.
‘This is not cancel culture’: DeSantis defends call to ban pro-Palestinian groups at Florida colleges
DeSantis last week had Ray Rodrigues, chancellor of Florida’s university system, order state universities to shut down campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine.
When pressed by NBC’s Kristin Welker about whether or not he had seen evidence that pro-Palestinian groups were providing such support, DeSantis cited protesters’ “words.”
“Their own words are saying they’re part of this organization, that they don’t just stand in solidarity, that they don’t just support what they did, but that this is their movement, too,” he said.
Republican to quit House citing party’s reliance on ‘lie’ of stolen 2020 election
“I have decided I’m not going to seek re-election,” Ken Buck of Colorado told MSNBC on Wednesday, after news that Kay Granger of Texas, the longest-serving Republican congresswoman, will also step down next year.
“I always have been disappointed with our inability in Congress to deal with major issues and I’m also disappointed that the Republican party continues to rely on this lie that the 2020 election was stolen and rely on the January 6 narrative and political prisoners from January 6 and other things,” Buck said.
“If we’re going to solve difficult problems, we’ve got to deal with some very unpleasant truths or lies and make sure that we project to the public what the truth is.”