Politics

Revealed: Charles Haywood, creator of the Society for American Civic Renewal, has said he might serve as ‘warlord’ at the head of an ‘armed patronage network’

Special counsel Jack Smith’s team revealed the details of the employee’s about-face in a new filing.

Former President Trump’s decision to skip the first Republican presidential primary debate is fueling Republican angst that his rivals will have little opportunity to catch up to him in the polls.

Many senior Republican officials and strategists in Washington think Trump would be a weak candidate in the general election and have an uphill path to beating President Biden in 2024.

But there’s also a growing sense among Republican lawmakers and other party leaders that Trump may have wrapped up the nomination months before the Iowa caucuses, despite facing 91 felony counts and four criminal trials.

This in turn has left them worried about their chances of defeating Biden despite his weak approval ratings and of taking back control of the Senate despite this cycle’s favorable electoral map.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), one of seven Republican senators to vote to convict Trump on the impeachment charge of inciting insurrection, predicted over the weekend that Trump “will lose to Joe Biden” and declared “if President Trump ends up getting the nomination but cannot win the general, that means we will have four more years of policies which have led to very high inflation.”

Reflecting broader GOP pessimism among Republicans about Trump’s chances of winning the White House next year given his unpopularity with independent and women voters, Cassidy said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Trump should drop out of the race.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a member of the Senate Republican leadership team, told a group of Texas reporters in May that Trump couldn’t win the general election.

“What’s the most important thing for me is that we have a candidate who can actually win,” he said. “I don’t think President Trump understands that when you run in a general election, you have to appeal to voters beyond your base.”

Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.), who is running for governor in his home state, on Monday danced around questions about Trump’s electability and touted entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy as a candidate who would present a tough challenge to Biden in 2024 and help turn around the country’s fiscal problems.

Asked by CNBC anchor Joe Kernen if Trump could win the general election, Braun said that Democrats are helping him in the primary by pushing politically motivated prosecutions because they think he would be a weak candidate in November 2024.

“I think whatever they try politically through the indictments and so forth, that strengthens him, not weakens him,” he said of the multiple indictments against Trump.

When Kernen noted that Democrats think Biden can beat Trump, Braun acknowledged, “They are tabulating it that way.”

Trump’s calculation that he can skip the debate without feeling any repercussions is fueling GOP concerns that he faces little serious competition in the primary. They worry it will be even harder for other candidates to catch him in the polls if they don’t have a chance to confront the front-runner on stage before a national television audience.

“It does make it more difficult in part because they won’t have nearly the audience that they would have if Trump was there and the whole game would be how those candidates stand up to Trump, whether they are directly critical of him,” said Steven S. Smith, professor emeritus of political science at Washington University in St. Louis.

Smith said the debates are more likely to change the trajectory of the race if Trump actually shows up.

“It’s not obvious to me that Trump would do well in a debate. He’s riding so high that it’s entirely possible that he would lose his temper, ultimately look very unpresidential and it could very well be that the other candidates would effectively beat up on him,” he said.

While polls show Trump is dominating the rest of the Republican presidential field, Republican voters aren’t happy about his decision to skip Wednesday’s debate in Milwaukee and declare the race effectively over.

A new poll by Firehouse Strategies, a public affairs firm, and 3D Strategic Research found that two-thirds of Republican primary voters want to see Trump on the debate stage.

The poll found that Trump’s supporters are even hungrier to see him battle his Republican opponents face to face — 77 percent of them said he should participate in the debate.

Alex Conant, a Republican strategist and partner at Firehouse Strategies, said Trump is employing “the classic frontrunner strategy of not giving the opposition oxygen.”

“Going on the debate stage is going to give the other candidates a chance to take him on directly,” he said. “He figures he could skip at least the first two debates and not suffer in the long run.”

Conant said if one of the other candidates emerges through the debates as “the primary alternative to Trump,” then “you could see Trump’s lead cut very quickly.”

He said Trump’s strategy is to make that tougher by staying away and likely limiting the size of the national television audience.

He acknowledged, however, that Trump will be very tough to beat in the primary because of his huge lead in the polls and the fact that the 50 percent of the GOP electorate not currently supporting his campaign are deeply split over whom they would prefer.

“Anyone who is looking at the polls recognizes that beating Trump at this point is very difficult. You look at where we were six months ago when Donald Trump was in the thirties, there was one obvious alternative and there was a real sense that the party was ready to move on,” Conant said, referring to what appeared to be a more competitive race between Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) earlier this year.

“Here we are less six months from actual voting and Trump is as dominant as ever. The only candidate with any momentum in this race is Trump,” he said. “That said, the debates haven’t started, Trump’s legal woes are unprecedented, and there remains interest in an alternative just none of these [other] candidates have broken through.

“That’s what debates are for,” he said.

Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Trump’s campaign, told Newsmax that Trump’s decision to skip the debate “is really going to put the spotlight on … the fact that this ‘DeSantis reboot 4.0’ is not going so well.”

A Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom poll of likely Republican caucus voters released Monday found that Trump’s lead over DeSantis has grown by 5 points since his indictment in Georgia last week on 13 criminal charges related to trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the state.

The poll found 42 percent of likely caucusgoers plan to support Trump while 19 percent say they support DeSantis.

Sen. Joni Ernst (R), who represents Iowa, which will host the first contest of the 2024 presidential primary season, told The Hill last month that Trump should participate in the first debate.

“Yes, he should. I think all of our Republican candidates need to express their views on the topics that are really important not just to Iowans but to all Americans,” she said.

Conant, the GOP strategist, said Cassidy’s view that Trump will likely lose to Biden is shared more broadly by Republican officials and strategists in Washington.

“People are tired of losing and we lost three straight elections with Donald Trump leading the party and there’s concern his standing with independents hasn’t gotten any better,” he said.

Smith, the political scientist affiliated with Washington University in St. Louis, said he’s surprised that not more Republican senators have joined Cassidy in calling on Trump to drop out of the race given the drag his legal problems put on his viability as a general election candidate.

“I’m surprised more Republicans have not said that already,” he said, arguing that Trump’s legal problems are “obvious baggage that congressional Republicans do not want to carry into an election next year.”

“If the party’s entire reputation is wrapped up in Trump — and who knows what his legal status will be [before Election Day] — that’s just the kind of uncertainty that Republicans want to avoid,” he said.

Donald Trump Jr. will travel to Wisconsin this week to serve as a surrogate for his father at the first Republican presidential primary debate. “We’re excited to see all of our friends …

Mr. Trump was told not to intimidate or threaten any witnesses or co-defendants in the case.

A national group of sheriffs that claims the top law enforcers in American counties are not bound by federal law has successfully spread its doctrine to dozens of states in recent years.

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/1671724

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/1671673

This ‘Far-Right’ Bit Is Getting Old https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/this-far-right-bit-is-getting-old-5469580 So when the media complains that people doing normal things and making justifiable complaints against the system as it is are “far-right,” what they're really confessing is their own ideological commitments. They're leftists in what they imagine to be a grand ideological struggle against the right. In this struggle, they want no one to be independent.

The Senate majority leader concedes it will take time for law's full impact to be felt, but says its effect is "cumulative" and Democratic candidates would be persistent in touting the law.

Former President Donald Trump's rhetoric could be setting him up for an ugly clash with judges overseeing the criminal cases against him.

In Guatemala, an anti-corruption candidate wins the run-off elections by a landslide, in a vote that was a critical test of the Central American country's democratic credentials.

On Monday, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis issued the fourth indictment of former President Donald Trump this year, this time for activities related…

The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas ruled yesterday that portions of Texas Senate Bill 1, adopted in September 2021, violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The court found that parts of S.B. 1 require officials to reject mail-in ballot applications and mail-in ballots based on errors or omissions that are not material in determining whether voters are qualified under Texas law to vote or cast a mail ballot.

It’s no accident that Trump has targeted officials and citizens who play key roles in the criminal justice system now focused on holding him to account. It’s no accident that his followers hear his…

NEW YORK (AP) — Former President Donald Trump confirmed Sunday that he will be skipping Wednesday’s first Republican presidential primary debate — and others as well.

“The public knows who I am & what a successful Presidency I had,” Trump wrote on his social media site. “I WILL THEREFORE NOT BE DOING THE DEBATES!” His spokesman did not immediately clarify whether he plans to boycott every primary debate or just those that have currently been scheduled.

The former president and early GOP frontrunner had said for months that he saw little upside in joining his GOP rivals on stage when they gather for the first time in Milwaukee Wednesday, given his commanding lead in the race. And he had made clear to those he had spoken to in recent days that his opinion had not changed.

“Why would I allow people at 1 or 2% and 0% to be hitting me with questions all night?” he said in an interview in June with Fox News host Bret Baier, who will be serving as a moderator. Trump has also repeatedly criticized Fox, the host of the Aug. 23 primetime event, insisting it is a “hostile network” that he believes will not treat him fairly.

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy suggested Friday if elected in 2024, he would run the government like tech billionaire Elon Musk runs the social media platform X, formerly known a…

While some ­on the right portray accountability for the Jan. 6 Capitol riot as just another partisan dispute, two prominent conservative legal scholars have made the case that the Constitution disqualifies former President Trump from public office.

Last week, law professors William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas — both members of the conservative Federalist Society — argued in a law review article that Trump is already constitutionally forbidden from serving in public office because of Section Three of the 14th Amendment.

This section, also known as the Disqualification Clause, bars from office any government officer who takes an oath to defend the Constitution and then engages in or aids an insurrection against the United States. Only a two-thirds majority of both houses of Congress can act to remove such disability.

It should not come as a surprise that Trump meets this standard. All three branches of the government have identified the attack on the Capitol as an insurrection, with multiple federal judges, bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate, as well as the bipartisan Jan. 6 House select committee, citing Trump as its central cause.

As Baude and Paulsen note, “Section Three requires no prior criminal-law conviction, for treason or any other defined crime, as a prerequisite for its disqualification to apply.” Trump’s indictment by special counsel Jack Smith for election-related crimes only further bolsters the case for his constitutional disqualification.

Those federal criminal charges include conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights by attempting to “oppress, threaten or intimidate” people in their free exercise and enjoyment of their right to vote.

Although Trump’s role in fomenting the attack on the Capitol has been well documented, Baude and Paulsen argue that the “full legal consequences” of Section Three “have not been appreciated or enforced.” As they explain, the Disqualification Clause is “an enforceable part of the Constitution, not limited to the Civil War, and not effectively repealed by nineteenth century amnesty legislation.”

The provision is also “self-executing … without the need for additional action by Congress.” As the professors note, Section Three “can and should be enforced by every official, state or federal, who judges qualifications.”

Last September, three New Mexico residents represented by my organization, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, won the first case in more than 150 years removing an elected official from office based on participation in an insurrection. The court ruled that then-New Mexico County Commissioner Couy Griffin had violated Section Three of the 14th Amendment by recruiting men for battle to join Trump’s “wild” effort to overturn the election Jan. 6, normalized violence and breached police barriers as part of the weaponized mob that allowed others to overwhelm law enforcement and storm the Capitol. Griffin’s removal marked the first case at the federal or state level concluding that what occurred Jan. 6 was an insurrection.

In Griffin’s case, the court found that disqualifying officials under Section Three of the 14th Amendment does not conflict with the First Amendment right to protest. It also rebuffed attempts by Griffin to conflate Jan. 6 with Black Lives Matter protests.

In their article, Baude and Paulsen explain that “to the extent of any conflict with prior constitutional rules, Section Three repeals, supersedes, or simply satisfies them,” including “the free speech principles of the First Amendment.”

Most importantly, the authors conclude that Section Three covers a “broad range of conduct against the authority of the constitutional order” and “a broad range of former offices, including the presidency.” They state explicitly that Section Three “disqualifies former President Donald Trump, and potentially many others, because of their participation in the attempted overthrow of the 2020 presidential election.”

Every president, regardless of party, takes an oath to preserve and defend the Constitution of the United States. Enforcing the Disqualification Clause against an official who violated that oath is an act of patriotism, not partisanship. As Baude and Paulsen correctly state, “Officials must enforce the Constitution because it is law … Section Three has legal force already.”

The Disqualification Clause has already been used successfully to promote accountability for the insurrection, and, in the coming months, it will be used again to prevent Trump and others from serving in public office.

The former president said his lawyers would instead put "Irrefutable & Overwhelming evidence" in their legal filings over his latest indictment.

A video obtained by MSNBC shows former Trump advisor Roger Stone laying out a plan to subvert the Electoral College before the election was even called

The initiative has 120,000 signatures more than needed — but that might not be enough to pass through the Florida Supreme Court.

To hear almost anyone tell it, racial preferences in university admissions are dead. But this pervasive sense of finality belies a curious silence in the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions. The Court never expressly overrules the line of precedent that has allowed universities to discriminate for the last 50 years. Without a direct overruling, how can we know whether the Supreme Court has ended racial preferences or simply renovated the existing case law?

A careful reading of the Chief Justice’s opinion and an understanding of his judicial philosophy indicates that the Court has left universities with no realistic means to rely on racial preferences in admissions, even if the case law stating otherwise lingers in a vegetative state. Four key cases have formed the foundation for racial preferences in student admissions, with a case called Grutter v. Bollinger as the cornerstone. The Students for Fair Admissions case presented the Court with a choice: either apply the existing test under Grutter and friends or uproot the whole line of precedent.

And here’s the odd silence sitting at the very heart of Students for Fair Admissions: It is no easy task to tell which approach the Chief Justice took in his majority opinion. His silence on whether Grutter remains good law is even more striking given that the petitioner in the case and 23 amici supporting the petitioner openly called for the Court to overrule Grutter. Everyone expected the Court to say something about it.

Yet the Chief Justice only seemed to hold that Harvard and UNC did not satisfy the existing test for racial preferences in admissions, known as strict scrutiny. Sort of. While he did not overturn or even openly challenge Grutter and friends, his opinion seems to directly contradict the key holding in those cases. So, did he change the rules entirely? That question requires us to answer two others: Does Students for Fair Admissions conflict with Grutter’s reasoning and thus quietly bury it? And would the Chief Justice have had a reason for holding a private graveside funeral for Grutter without publishing an obituary?

The answer to the first question seems to be yes, but it requires some unpacking. The Chief Justice seems to part ways with Grutter’s foundational holding. Grutter’s “strict scrutiny” test requires two things: first, that the university’s use of race be justified by a compelling interest, and second, that the university pursue that interest in a narrowly tailored way (i.e., with a scalpel rather than a chainsaw).

Grutter and friends said universities had a compelling interest in the “educational benefits” of a diverse student body. Racial diversity on campus, said Grutter, “promotes cross-racial understanding,” “breaks down racial stereotypes,” and makes classroom discussions “livelier, more spirited, and simply more enlightening and interesting.” The Court lumped on additional aphorisms in a follow-up case called Fisher II: the “robust exchange of ideas,” “preparation for an increasingly diverse workforce,” and “cultivation of a set of leaders with legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry.”

This “educational benefits” interest is the key to racial preferences in student admissions, as the Supreme Court has rejected every other proposed interest, such as remedying past racial wrongs or mirroring society’s racial demographics. But the Chief Justice’s opinion seems to now reject the “educational benefits” interest, leaving racial preferences without any compelling interest at all.

In articulating their interests, Harvard and UNC figured they would be safe if they just paraphrased the interests that the Supreme Court approved in Grutter and Fisher II. But the Chief Justice was not satisfied. He claimed that the universities’ interests—lifted almost verbatim from the Court’s own opinions—“are not sufficiently coherent for purposes of strict scrutiny.” How, Roberts opines, can a court decide whether an exchange of ideas has achieved peak robustness? These interests, Roberts claims, are “inescapably imponderable.”

Right or not—and I think he is right—this is a clear departure from Grutter and Fisher II. In fact, the Chief Justice here makes the exact argument that the dissenters made in Fisher II. That dissent, joined by the Chief Justice, argued that the University of Texas had not articulated its interests “with any degree of specificity.” And the interests asserted by the University of Texas were—wait for it—almost exactly the same as the ones asserted by Harvard and UNC: cross-racial understanding, stereotype obliteration, and so on.

In other words, the Chief Justice seems to have quietly transformed the Fisher II dissent into the law of the land. And, to quote the mystic Sybil Trelawney from Harry Potter, “neither can live while the other survives”—if the Chief Justice has breathed life into the Fisher II dissent, then Grutter is dead. Or is it “mostly dead,” as the much more competent mystic Miracle Max might put it? After all, perhaps universities can satisfy the Chief Justice’s demand for greater specificity in articulating their interests in the educational benefits of diversity. I suspect this is an impossible task, and I suspect the Chief Justice knows it.

Consider, for example, how a university might make its interests more concrete and measurable, as the Chief Justice demands. A university could say, for instance, that cross-racial understanding will be achieved once our student body is 30 percent black and Hispanic. More specific? Yes. But the university will have only veered away from Scylla (overly vague interests) to run into the domain of Charybdis (unlawful quotas). While the Supreme Court gave its blessing to racial preferences, it has always made one thing clear: racial quotas or their functional equivalents are off-limits. In fact, under Grutter and friends, universities must be fuzzy about how much they rely on race because race should be just one unquantified factor in a holistic review of a student’s application. This is why the Court struck down a point system used by the University of Michigan that gave minority students a 20-point boost.

So “cross-racial understanding” is too vague, but anything too specific strays into quota territory. Universities facing this conundrum have drummed up a magical notion called “critical mass.” How will courts know when a university has achieved its diversity interests? When they’ve reached a critical mass of minority students. And what is a critical mass? Whatever number of minority students is enough to satisfy the university’s diversity interests. Grutter blessed this dizzying circularity, which always winds back to whatever the university deems best. There is simply no daylight left between the overly vague “educational benefits” of diversity and the forbidden quota.

Some observers have pointed to a passage toward the end of the Chief Justice’s opinion as evidence that he blessed narrow uses of racial preferences. He writes that universities can still consider “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.” But I don’t see this as a racial preference at all. For instance, I have white cousins who grew up in China. If one of them wrote a personal essay about the discrimination he faced growing up, then that could be weighed alongside a black applicant’s essay about experiencing discrimination in the United States. This experiential focus is distinct from what the Fisher II dissent called a “bare racial stamp,” in which my cousin’s race would count against him, and the black applicant’s race would count in his favor.

So Grutter seems to be gone, and racial preferences with it. Justice Thomas, in concurrence, agrees: “The Court’s opinion rightly makes clear that Grutter is, for all intents and purposes, overruled.” And Justice Sotomayor’s dissent agrees with Justice Thomas. If the Chief Justice thought this an unfair characterization of his opinion, he could have said so. Instead, he kept his silence on Grutter’s fate despite responding to other criticisms leveled by the dissents.

This still leaves the question of whether the Chief Justice might have had a reason not to just expressly overrule Grutter and friends if he really meant to end them entirely. The somewhat unsatisfying but likely answer is that the Chief Justice simply does not like to overrule precedent. He is known for his distaste for big dramatic swings. In 2005, at his Senate confirmation hearing, he said, “It is a jolt to the legal system when you overrule a precedent,” which “plays an important role in promoting stability and evenhandedness.” His cautious approach was on display recently in Dobbs, where he departed from the majority on overruling abortion precedent and pushed for a “more measured course.”

This would not be the first time the Chief Justice has been accused of overruling major precedent on the sly. In a 2007 campaign finance case that paved the way for Citizens United three years later, Justice Scalia accused the Chief of overruling precedent “without saying so,” calling his opinion “faux judicial restraint” that only causes “judicial obfuscation.” Students for Fair Admissions may be another example of the Chief Justice grappling with his own discomfort about overturning precedent.

Combining a careful look at Grutter and an understanding of Chief Justice Roberts’s reluctance to expressly overturn precedent, we can conclude that Grutter has been silently interred. But we will doubtless see pundits, jurists, and universities pointing out this silence and seeking to leverage it to their own ends—namely, reviving racial preferences. That’s the gamble the Chief Justice has taken. By failing to expressly overrule Grutter, he’s left room for mischief and confusion.

This has happened before. Justice Scalia once referred to a precedent that refused to die despite repeated opinions disavowing it as a “ghoul in a late-night horror movie that repeatedly sits up in its grave and shuffles abroad, after being repeatedly killed and buried.” Grutter may lie uneasy in its coffin as well. One could wish the Chief Justice had gone for the head and put a clear end to Grutter to avoid this trouble. But read in good faith and with both eyes open, it is not too hard to follow the Chief Justice’s reasoning: racial preferences are gone for good.

The National Labor Relations Board could soon make it much easier for workers to unionize. The board plans to re-establish the Joy Silk Doctrine, which would force employers to recognize and bargain with their employees' union if a majority of workers sign authorization cards.

This would turn the tables in favor of workers and eliminate a key union-busting tactic employers use to stifle organizing. By enabling workers to unionize via card check and preventing employers from dragging out the process into a time-intensive union election, the decision would make it vastly easier for workers to win a union.

Steven Greenhouse explains. Greenhouse is a journalist and the author of The Big Squeeze and Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor.

Donald Trump and 18 other associates were charged late Monday in Georgia as part of a sweeping indictment alleging they schemed to illegally overturn his 2020 election loss and stop the peaceful transition of power.

Floyd was the executive director of the group created by Trump in 2020 to increase Black turnout at the election.