“The president’s lawyers asked a judge Friday to extend key deadlines on the multibillion lawsuit against his presidential administration, but hidden within the pages of the legal filing was a profound detail: that the president has been in talks with his own government staffers to ‘avoid protracted litigation,'” The New Republic reports.
Prop 8 Supporters Lose Federal Ruling – Tapes To Be Released
In a ruling on the Prop 8 case, a federal court judge has found no valid reason to hide videotapes of the trial that found Prop 8 unconstitutional, and has ordered them released — on September 30. Chief U.S. District Court Judge James Ware found “no compelling reasons” to continue to keep the tapes from the public, and called the anti-gay Prop 8 supporters’ claims that witnesses testified in favor of Prop 8 might suffer harm from Prop 8 opponents an “unsupported hypothesis.”
Which means, Maggie Gallagher of the National Organization For Marriage (NOM), Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council (FRC), the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), ProtectMarriage.com, and all the other “family” anti-gay groups can band together and file a motion to appeal this appealed ruling, all the way to the Supreme Court if they like.
Let them. The more cash they spend on senseless arguments that have already been twice decided is cash they don’t have to spend creating lies like this.
Pam Spaulding asks, “Imagine what gold can be mined from those tapes to fight amendment efforts and to bolster marriage equality in states where there is a prospect of it!”
Towleroad notes,
The San Diego Gay & Lesbian News reported on the late August hearing:
David Thompson, an attorney for the Prop 8 supporters, contended that the release of the videotape would put their two star witnesses in harm’s way because their faces and voices would become publicly known. AFER attorneys argued that because the two witnesses are already publicly known because they have frequently testified for anti-gay groups in trials. Furthermore, the AFER attorneys noted that the two witnesses have not been “intimidated†in any way since the Prop 8 trial last year.
And Politico expands,
Same-sex marriage opponents had sought to keep the trial recording under wraps, citing what they contended were assurances from the judge who handled the trial and later retired, Vaughn Walker. Those opposing public release of the video also argued that release was effectively barred by a Supreme Court order overturning plans for a live, closed-circuit broadcast of the trial to various courthouses across the country.
However, Ware said that the Supreme Court ruling didn’t amount to a requirement to seal the video and that the recording had been used both by the judge and at trial.
“The Court finds that the record does not support the contention that Judge Walker limited the digital recording to chambers use only,” Ware wrote. “Judge Walker, without objection, made copies of the digital recording available to the parties for use during closing arguments….At least two of the parties obtained copies of the digital recording, and one of the parties played segments on the record during closing argument in open court.”
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President Donald Trump is now in “discussions” with his own government to settle his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, a federal agency he exercises limited influence over, after a contractor released 15 years of his tax returns in 2019, which were published by The New York Times two months before the 2020 election.
“Good cause exists to grant an extension in this matter while the Parties engage in discussions designed to resolve this matter and to avoid protracted litigation,” Trump’s lawyers argued, TNR notes. “This limited pause will neither prejudice the Parties nor delay ultimate resolution. Rather, the extension will promote judicial economy and allow the Parties to explore avenues that could narrow or resolve the issues efficiently.”
TNR also repots that legal experts “have questioned whether a president can sue his own administration to pocket taxpayer money, and have expressed doubts about whether Trump’s Justice Department can appropriately defend the financial institutions.”
Critics allege a conflict of interest in the case.
READ MORE: ‘Incurable Conflict of Interest’: Kushner Under Sweeping Investigation by House Democrats
“Right out in the open, Donald Trump is suing his own IRS to try to steal $10 BILLION taxpayer dollars,” charged U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who notes she has introduced legislation to prevent “this theft.”
Political scientist Brendan Nyhan described the situation as Trump “Negotiating with himself to loot the US Treasury.”
“Nothing beats reaching into the taxpayers’ pocket and helping oneself to $10 billion,” wrote Richard Field, the Director of the Institute for Financial Transparency.
“Trump is suing the federal government and cashing in. Who approves these settlements? HE DOES of course. There is no bottom to his shamelessness. Meanwhile American families suffer,” wrote U.S. Rep. Darren Soto (D-FL).
“Trump is just stealing $10 billion from taxpayers! That’s very MAGA,” charged Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
READ MORE: Conservative Christian Broadcaster Slams Franklin Graham’s ‘Embarrassing’ Defense of Trump
Image via Reuters
MAGA has made a deal with Donald Trump, and the deal is that “the humiliation is the point,” argues Republican former U.S. Congressman Adam Kinzinger. In short, he says, “humiliating the MAGA faithful only binds them more tightly to Trump.”
Kinzinger, a never-Trump Republican who acknowledged last year that his politics are now probably closer to the Democrats, says that to “understand what Trump is doing, you have to stop thinking about each outrage as a separate event and start seeing them as a sequence.”
He walks through a timeline of humiliations.
Trump asked MAGA to believe the 2020 election was stolen, so they did, “including many who knew better.”
Trump asked MAGA to excuse the January 6 attack on the Capitol as a mere tourist visit, and they did.
“He asked them to accept that his 91 criminal indictments were a political witch hunt — and they did, turning his mugshot into a fundraising image,” he writes. “Each ask was larger than the last. Each capitulation required more of them — more willingness to contradict their own eyes, their own values, their own stated beliefs.”
READ MORE: ‘Incurable Conflict of Interest’: Kushner Under Sweeping Investigation by House Democrats
Kinzinger reveals the psychology of what he believes is actually happening here.
“Every time MAGA accepts something they previously would have considered unacceptable, Trump’s hold on them gets stronger, not weaker. Because now they’ve paid a price. They’ve told their neighbors, their families, their coworkers, that they believe this. Walking it back would mean admitting they were wrong. And the movement doesn’t allow that.”
What does this mean for the future?
“Don’t expect a wholesale collapse in Trump’s support,” he predicts. “Some will leave, others have tied their conscience to his success. Those will double down, again and again.”
Kinzinger expects that MAGA is not breaking apart. “I don’t think there’s some dramatic rupture coming where the movement looks in the mirror and decides enough is enough. That’s not how this works,” he writes. Because Trump has trained his movement to accept humiliation as “proof of loyalty.”
“The more outrageous the thing he asks them to believe, the more committed they become,” he explains, “because disbelief now would mean admitting everything they’ve already accepted was wrong. It’s a trap that gets harder to escape the longer you’re in it.”
But, he says, “the humiliation ritual works until the day it doesn’t.”
“Until the day enough people decide that the price of belonging is higher than the price of leaving. We’re not there yet,” he explains. “But we’re closer than Trump wants you to think.”
READ MORE: Conservative Christian Broadcaster Slams Franklin Graham’s ‘Embarrassing’ Defense of Trump
Image via Reuters
The Trump regime has an “erratic” and “theologically incomprehensible” preferred religion, a “bellicose, nationalist Christianity,” that is organized along various “fiefdoms,” argues Sarah Posner at Talking Points Memo. Those spheres of control and influence are “aimed at protecting, and even justifying, the regime’s impunity.”
Posner writes that the “goal of the Christian nationalist project is to subvert democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.”
She posits that during Trump’s second term, the White House and federal agencies “have been bludgeoning federal employees, the press, and the public with religious pronouncements of moral superiority to perceived enemies.”
On Easter Sunday, several administration agencies posted social media messages “heralding Christ’s resurrection,” the Associated Press reported.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote: “The tomb is empty. The promise is fulfilled. Through His sacrifice, we are redeemed. We stand firm in faith, courage, and truth.”
READ MORE: ‘Incurable Conflict of Interest’: Kushner Under Sweeping Investigation by House Democrats
“He is risen,” was the message from both the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department.
The Department of Justice went even further.
“Today, as millions of Christians gather in their churches across the nation to celebrate the resurrection of Christ, this Department —- is proud to protect and defend religious liberty,” the message read.
Posner argues how various administration officials use religion.
JD Vance “starts fights with the pope over his anti-war statements (even as Vance leaks to the press, with an eye to 2028, that he was against the war).”
Through his prayer meetings and press conferences, Secretary Hegseth “aims to compel Americans to embrace his Christian nationalist bloodlust and war crimes, and this week compared reporters to Pharisees for insufficiently cheerleading for the military.”
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer “has promoted her Catholicism in prayer meetings modeled on the ones Hegseth hosts at the Pentagon.”
“All these moves,” Posner writes, “are designed to crush dissent, marginalize other Christianities and religions, and empower government officials to violate the law. The fiefdoms, in different ways, prop up the would-be king’s corruption, and that of his allies.”
READ MORE: Conservative Christian Broadcaster Slams Franklin Graham’s ‘Embarrassing’ Defense of Trump
Image via Reuters
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