“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.
News
Calls Mount for Biden to Seize Control of National Guard as Abbott Ignores SCOTUS Ruling
Legal experts and members of Congress have started to urge President Joe Biden to seize control of the Texas National Guard, which Governor Greg Abbott is using to defy federal law and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling while continuing to obstruct federal agents from accessing the border.
“Texas’s constitutional authority,” Governor Abbott claimed Wednesday, “is the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes.”
For months, the Texas Republican governor has been ramping up his attacks on the Biden administration’s handling of what right wing pundits and politicians call the “border crisis,” undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers crossing from Mexico into the United States.
Alleging Texas is now under “an invasion,” Gov. Abbott issued an inflammatory statement tinged with language so defiant that The Nation’s justice correspondent, Elie Mystal joked, “I read this in the original Confederate.”
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Abbott claims, wrongly according to U.S. Constitution and to the conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court, that Texas law “supersedes” federal law, and vows to continue to not only continue to lay down more deadly razor wire but to block federal border patrol agents from accessing the border.
CBS Texas Wednesday evening posted this report:
Abbott alleges in his statement President Biden has violated the U.S. Constitution.
“The federal government has broken the compact between the United States and the States. The Executive Branch of the United States has a constitutional duty to enforce federal laws protecting States, including immigration laws on the books right now,” Abbott declares in his statement. “President Biden has refused to enforce those laws and has even violated them. The result is that he has smashed records for illegal immigration. Despite having been put on notice in a series of letters one of which I delivered to him by hand President Biden has ignored Texas’s demand that he perform his constitutional duties.”
Citing “James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and the other visionaries who wrote the U.S. Constitution,” Abbott decrees, “The failure of the Biden Administration to fulfill the duties imposed by Article IV, § 4 has triggered Article I, § 10, Clause 3, which reserves to this State the right of self-defense.”
“I have already declared an invasion under Article I, § 10, Clause 3 to invoke Texas’s constitutional authority to defend and protect itself,” Abbott warns. “That authority is the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary. The Texas National Guard, the Texas Department of Public Safety, and other Texas personnel are acting on that authority, as well as state law, to secure the Texas border.”
Some experts are warning Abbott’s defiance and refusal to obey the Supreme Court and the Constitution could spark a second U.S. Civil War.
Professor of Law Eric Segall, who teaches about the federal courts and constitutional law and is the author of books on originalism and the U.S. Supreme Court, wrote: “Wow, I predicted Texas might not comply. Is this bluffing or is Texas going to start Civil War II.”
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Professor of law and political scientist Anthony Michael Kreis first mocked Abbott, then took a deep dive into his statement.
Calling Abbott’s statement “sincerely bat shit crazy,” Kreis asked, “Did John Calhoun write this?” He was referring to the 19th century U.S. vice president who was a defender of slavery and supporter of nullification, the alleged “right” of a state to “nullify” a federal law it claims is unconstitutional.
“By this logic,” wrote University of Texas School of Law professor of law Steve Vladeck, referring to Abbott’s statement, “states could use their own determination that an ‘invasion’ exists as a justification for usurping control of whichever federal policies they don’t like. Whatever you think about current immigration policy, this is just a 21st-century re-packaging of nullification.”
Kreis continued, also writing, “Joe Biden should respond to Greg Abbott by federalizing the Texas National Guard,” and suggested some of Abbott’s “rhetorical choices” echoed “the Texas secession ordinance from 1861.”
Compare some of the rhetorical choices in Greg Abbott’s assertion of a sovereign right to self defense and the Texas secession ordinance from 1861. pic.twitter.com/UePXyM4oDp
— Anthony Michael Kreis (@AnthonyMKreis) January 24, 2024
U.S. Reps. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) and Greg Casar (D-TX) also said President Biden should take control of the National Guard in Texas.
“Governor Greg Abbott is using the Texas National Guard to obstruct and create chaos at the border,” Congressman Castro wrote on Tuesday. “If Abbott is defying yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling, @POTUS needs to establish sole federal control of the Texas National Guard now.”
Congressman Casar, agreeing with Congressman Castro, added on Wednesday, “Greg Abbott has continued to use political stunts and inflammatory language to advance his own agenda, violating the Constitution and endangering both U.S. citizens and asylum seekers.”
“Abbott is following the Donald Trump playbook: make immigration harder and more dangerous, so asylum seekers are pushed into the hands of cartels and the system remains broken,” Casar wrote. “I agree with @JoaquinCastrotx: if Abbott is defying yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling, @POTUS needs to establish sole federal control of the Texas National Guard.”
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Sawyer Hackett, a Democratic strategist and senior advisor to Julian Castro, adds, “South Texas Rep. @JoaquinCastrotx is urging President Biden to nationalize the TX National Guard—as reports indicate Gov. Abbott is defying *the Supreme Court* with his continued obstruction of federal authorities. Abbott isn’t above the law. This is a good fight to pick.”
Hackett added:
Wow. The governor of Texas is flagrantly violating an order from the Supreme Court, installing razor wire that federal authorities were approved to remove.
Enough is enough. Nationalize the Texas National Guard. Put Abbott in his place. pic.twitter.com/JE7GTspW1Y
— Sawyer Hackett (@SawyerHackett) January 24, 2024
Read the social media posts above or at this link.
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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.
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“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.”
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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.”
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“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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