<Former Mueller investigation prosecutor Andrew Weissmann is being sued by Stefan Passantino, a Trumpworld-paid lawyer who initially represented former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, reported The Guardian's Hugo Lowell on Friday.

Passantino alleges that Weissmann, a frequent legal commentator on cable news, defamed him when he said that he had "coached" Hutchinson to lie to the House January 6 Committee during her testimony.

Hutchinson gave bombshell allegations to the Committee about former President Donald Trump's activities on the day of the attack on the U.S. Capitol, claiming, among other things, that Trump demanded the Capitol take down security for the rioters because "they're not there to hurt me," and that he physically fought with his Secret Service driver when he refused to take him to the Capitol to join the rioters. Secret Service officials have disputed Hutchinson's version of events.

Reporting from CNN subsequently revealed that Passantino, whose law practice received funding from Trump's Save America PAC, was advising Hutchinson to say she did not remember various details about the day that would have put the former president in a bad light.

Passantino, who took a leave of absence from his law firm and faced an ethics complaint filed with the D.C. Bar following these allegations, has also sued the January 6 Committee for pushing what he says is a "false narrative" about his legal counsel.

But the allegations around Passantino are not isolated. Other attorneys who have been paid by Trump-linked groups to represent witnesses in investigations have also been accused of giving conflicted advice. Yuscil Taveras, an IT worker at the former president's Mar-a-Lago resort who reportedly witnessed the concealment of classified information, switched from a lawyer paid by Trump groups to a federal public defender, and changed his testimony as he did so.>

<Going to bed at the same time consistently helps many people sleep better. Now, evidence suggests it also might protect their heart health.

Having irregular sleep patterns — such as falling asleep at different times or having variations of more than two hours in sleep duration — is associated with an increased likelihood of developing atherosclerosis, a buildup of plaque on the artery walls, according to research recently published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

These fatty deposits cause arteries to narrow, reducing blood flow along with the amount of oxygen and other nutrients in the body. A plaque that bursts also can create a blood clot that leads to a heart attack or stroke.

Researchers analyzed data from more than 2,000 adults who were age 45 or older and had an average age of 69. Those who participated in the study wore a wrist device that monitored their waking and sleeping patterns. Participants also kept a sleep diary and completed a one-night, in-home sleep study.

Researchers looked at the presence of plaque in the arteries. Those who had sleep durations that varied by more than two hours during a week were more likely to have a higher score measuring the presence of coronary artery calcium and more likely to have carotid plaque.

They also were significantly more likely to have abnormal results from an ankle brachial index, which measures systemic atherosclerosis and stiffness in the blood vessels.

Coronary artery calcium scores were even higher for those with more irregular sleep timing.

In a summary of the study’s findings, study lead author Kelsie Full, an assistant professor of medicine in the division of epidemiology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, says:

“Maintaining regular sleep schedules and decreasing variability in sleep is an easily adjustable lifestyle behavior that can not only help improve sleep, but also help reduce cardiovascular risk for aging adults.”

Poor sleep has been linked to many health problems, including:

Heart disease
Hypertension
Obesity
Type 2 diabetes

The American Heart Association urges adults to get between seven and nine hours of sleep a night.>

Was this worthwhile, <stalker>?

<Deepening legal problems for Rudy Giuliani persisted Thursday when lawyers for Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, two election workers he defamed, filed a notice in federal court that he has still failed to pay them legal fees or submit evidence as ordered.

The 4-page filing in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia notes that Giuliani was ordered on Aug. 30 by U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell to produce discovery and pay attorneys fees no later than Sept. 20.

But that deadline came and went without action from the embroiled former New York City mayor.

Howell directed Giuliani to pay the women $89,172 in attorneys’ fees after he failed to comply with a series of court orders requesting discovery records in the defamation case. Howell found Giuliani liable for defaming the women after his incessant and false commentary after the 2020 election that Freeman and Moss manipulated vote totals while working at the State Farm Arena in Georgia that November.

Moss and Freeman’s attorneys point out too that Howell ordered Giuliani’s businesses, Giuliani Partners LLC and Giuliani Communications LLC, to pay $43,684 in additional legal fees the women incurred after a similar motion seeking records from those entities was granted.

A day before the notice was filed, Judge Howell set a trial date to determine exactly how much Giuliani must pay for his defamatory campaign against the election workers. The trial will begin Dec. 11 in Washington, D.C., and there will be no phoning it in: Howell ordered Giuliani to appear for each trial day in person.

Howell said the trial should only take three to five days.

Freeman and Moss experienced a wash of death threats, hate mail and harassment after Giuliani falsely accused them of election fraud. At one point, the women were even forced to flee their homes.

When testifying before the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol, Moss, a Black woman, recalled one of the racist threats she received — “Be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920” — suggesting she should be lynched.

Giuliani’s false accusations of election fraud against Moss and Freeman were championed by former President Donald Trump during the 2020 election and long after. This January, when the Jan. 6 committee finally released transcripts of Moss and Freeman’s public testimony before the panel the summer before, Trump posted a series of screeds on Truth Social attacking the women and invoking the same conspiracy theories shared by Giuliani.>

<Fingers are being pointed at House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) for squelching research to identify and clamp down on misinformation, the Washington Post is reporting.

According to the report, researchers seeking to figure out ways to weed out misrepresentations and lies with another election looming are blaming Jordan and a handful of his GOP collegues [sic] for making their lives miserable.

As the Post's Naomi Nix, Cat Zakrzewski and Joseph Menn wrote, "The escalating campaign — led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and other Republicans in Congress and state government — has cast a pall over programs that study not just political falsehoods but also the quality of medical information online."

Case in point, they note, is research being done at Stanford University that is stalling out under the threat of litigation.

Officials at the university, "... are discussing how they can continue tracking election-related misinformation through the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a prominent consortium that flagged social media conspiracies about voting in 2020 and 2022, several participants told The Washington Post. The coalition of disinformation researchers may shrink and also may stop communicating with X and Facebook about their findings."

According to the report dozens of analysts, "government officials, physicians, nonprofits and research funders, expressed frustration with how they are being treated."

One critic of the GOP's "war" on Big Tech tied to harassing President Joe Biden's administration that is hampering much needed safeguards is questionable.

According to Jen Jones, of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, "This effort is clearly intended to deter researchers from pursuing these studies and penalize them for their findings.”

"Disinformation scholars, many of whom tracked both covid-19 and 2020 election-rigging conspiracies, also have faced an onslaught of public records requests and lawsuits from conservative sympathizers echoing Jordan’s probe," the report states before adding, "Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s America First Legal Foundation is representing the founder of the conspiracy-spreading website, the Gateway Pundit, in a May lawsuit alleging researchers at Stanford, the University of Washington and other organizations conspired with the government to restrict speech. The case is ongoing.">

<Donald Trump on Friday suggested a retiring general might deserve the death penalty, prompting some to say he went too far and others to ask if the former president violated his court-ordered conditions for release.

Trump late in the evening lashed out against General Mark Milley, who said in a recent news profile that he was forced to keep Trump in check during his presidency. Trump came out swinging on Truth Social, blaming Milley for lives lost in the Afghanistan withdrawal and saying he may in fact deserve to be killed for his purported actions.

Conservatives including fellow GOP presidential candidate Chris Christie weighed in on that controversial statement.

Now, reporters, ex-prosecutors, and political operatives are asking the bigger questions about whether Milley is connected to Trump's court cases. If so, some onlookers posit, Trump may be subject to consequences in the courtroom, or potentially jail.

Kyle Cheney, a senior legal affairs reporter for Politico, asked the question on Saturday.

"One question I have about Trump’s overnight attack on Milley: Is he on the government’s witness list for Trump’s DC trial?" he asked. "He was a key Jan. 6 committee witness who said Trump privately admitted losing the election."

He followed-up with some context:

"The reason it matters if Milley is a potential trial witness (which Trump would know based on discovery) is the part of his release conditions in which he specifically swore not to tamper with or intimidate witnesses."

Tristan Snell, a former assistant attorney general in New York, also weighed in.

"My bet: Donald Trump is threatening General Milley because General Milley is on the government's witness list for the trial in the Mar-a-Lago documents case," he wrote.

Political commentator Lindy Li called it the "million dollar question."

"Given Trump’s latest and most deranged bout of stochastic terrorism, is General Milley on Jack Smith’s witness list?" she asked on Saturday. "If so, is anyone finally going to do anything about Trump’s persistent and dangerous witness tampering?"

Even George Takei made the connection between Milley and the witness lists.

"Gen. Milley is a patriot who served his country honorably all his career, instead of claiming bone spurs," Takei said. "He’s also likely a witness in the many trials of Donald Trump, including as the alleged author of the top secret Iranian War Plan that Trump waved around to brag and boast to civilians about how special he is. Trump attacks him at his peril, and likely in violation of court orders not to threaten or intimidate witnesses.">

<Women who worked in Donald Trump's White House struck back at Peter Navarro after the former president's old trade advisor called them "pimp ladies" and suggested men in power no longer want to employ any women because of them.

Former Donald Trump advisor Navarro is currently appealing his conviction after being found guilty on contempt charges. He claims he did nothing wrong and didn't have to answer questions about Trump because of executive privilege, but the court said that Navarro didn't provide evidence he was protected by that privilege.

On Thursday and Friday, Navarro lashed out at former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson and other veterans from Trump's administration, including Olivia Troye, the former Homeland Security aide to former Vice President Mike Pence, former White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham, Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former communications official in Trump's administration, and Fox News host and former Trump White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany.

"Watched Hutchinson in West Wing suck candy daily outside Meadows office doing NOTHING. Pimping new 'book' with White House loser alyssa farah. Hutchinson sold soul to J6 witch hunt. This her next 15 minutes of fame. @RudyGiuliani hero, Cassidy trash," he wrote on Thursday.

On Friday, he wrote, "Why would White House men - prez, vp, senior aide - EVER hire a woman after watching book pimps Cassiday [sic] Hutchinson, Alyssa Farah, Stephanie Grisham, Kayleigh McEnany, Olivia Troye throw mud @realDonaldTrump @RudyGiuliani et. al. Pimp ladies be giving real MAGA WOMEN bad name."

Grisham responded, asking if t-shirts might be appropriate.

"If someone wants to make/send me a 'Pimp Lady' T-shirt I wouldn’t be opposed," she wrote late Friday night.

Troye also replied, saying, "Welcome to the Trump White House…where the hardest working women are compared to wh-res & said to chomp on candy while the harassment by entitled conspiracy fear mongering loons like Rudy Giuliani & Peter Navarro lives on…"

"The truth hurts doesn’t it boys," she then added.

Sofia Kinzinger, the wife of former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), also chimed in on what Navarro's post means.

"Reading this tweet is like watching a soccer player score a goal for the opposite team," she said on Saturday. "It’s not like [Trump] is in desperate need of suburban women in order to win a general.">

<On National Voter Registration Day, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro made history by ensuring that Pennsylvania became the 24th state to implement automatic voter registration laws.

This plan, also known as a motor voter law, automatically registers an individual to vote when they receive their driver's licenses from the DMV.

Many have praised this plan as one that is secure and ensures that every resident of Pennsylvania eligible to drive a car is also eligible to vote.

Despite this, Donald Trump, the leading Republican candidate for President, went on a late night rant about what automatic voter registration could do to his future political prospects.

This post is unsurprising.

Automatic voter registration gives a voice to all those eligible to vote in America. No one who is not eligible would be registered under this program.

Significantly, 23 other states outside of Pennsylvania have some type of similar program, yet Trump is not attacking them.

The reason is simple.

Donald Trump knows that the more people registered to vote, the less likely he will be President for a second time because Republicans have historically won when voter turnout is suppressed.

Make no mistake, no one is trying to "steal Pennsylvania" other than Trump and those who spread the Big Lie.....>

Whaddayasay, <fredfradiavolo>? Ready to suppress voters' rights?

<From Alabama Republicans' blatantly discriminatory congressional map, to the Wisconsin GOP's ousting of a the [sic] states' [sic] top election official and attempt to impeach a liberal Supreme Court justice, to North Carolina's decision to allow the majority-Republican legislature to appoint state and local election board members, News from the States reports these anti-democratic moves have all recently "generated national headlines" and stoked fears ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

"If they can impeach someone successfully to stop them from ruling in a way they don't like, what will they do after the 2024 election?" Ben Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party told the news outlet, referring to state Republicans' "threat to impeach" state Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz. "It was one vote in our state Supreme Court that prevented the 2020 election from being overturned in Wisconsin. And they know who the justices were, so they could just suspend them. This would open the door to monsters that I don't think they'd be able to control."

News from the States points out other states like Ohio and Florida, which are also pushing anti-democratic legislation, have "flown further under the radar."

According to the report, "In Ohio, the Supreme Court has ruled five times that the state's current legislative maps are unconstitutional gerrymanders favoring Republicans. But the bipartisan commission that's supposed to draw fair maps hasn't met since May 2022."

Furthermore, "Lawmakers' goal appears to be to run out the clock and ram through skewed maps with little public scrutiny. Because the Supreme Court now has a conservative majority, it's expected to green-light whatever lawmakers come up with."

In the Sunshine State, "Acting on a request from the speaker of the House, the state Supreme Court last month created a commission to study changing the way prosecutors and judges are elected," the news outlet notes, which one advocate warned "would almost certainly be a near-fatal blow against the reform prosecutor movement in the state."

The report notes while these types of "power grabs" within state legislatures are not new, "advocates say, these efforts are even more dangerous for democracy. That's because, by giving lawmakers more power over elections or over their state's judicial system, many of these schemes strengthen and reinforce the ultimate threat of outright election subversion."

Joanna Lydgate, Chief Executive Officer of pro-democracy group States United Action emphasized, "We should call this what it is: an effort to lay the groundwork to subvert the will of the voters in future elections. While the focus is often on the national picture, our elections are run by the states. That means we need to keep shining a light on state-level efforts that undermine our democracy. It's the only way to shut it down.">

<A Justice Department request to impose a narrow gag order on former President Trump is raising a number of sticky issues for the court as it weighs how to address what prosecutors called “disparaging and inflammatory” remarks about nearly everyone involved in the Jan. 6 case.

The Justice Department argues Trump’s comments could taint the jury pool and intimidate witnesses who might be called to testify against him — threatening to damage the case with a series of remarks on social media and along the campaign trail.

But the request, if granted, raises First Amendment issues for the candidate and feeds into Trump’s long-running narrative that the Justice Department’s actions are designed to hamper his electoral prospects.

And the stakes are high for Trump, who has a predilection for making such remarks and ignoring the cautioning of staff, and who could face fines or even jail time for violating such an order.

“The devil will be in the detail. How do you frame an order that, on one hand, preserves the former president’s right to proclaim his innocence, including by making whatever outlandish — risible even — statements he wants, but drawing the line at intimidating statements?” said Jeff Robbins, a former state prosecutor now in private practice.

“The judge has to look down the road, not very far down the road, and have it in her mind, ‘OK, if he does this, I will have to do that.”

In making its case, the Justice Department cited a number of comments from Trump, from late 2020 in attacking those who challenged his case that the election was stolen, to a series of remarks targeting witnesses, prosecutors, and the judge overseeing the Jan. 6 case.

“Since the indictment in this case, the defendant has spread disparaging and inflammatory public posts on Truth Social on a near-daily basis regarding the citizens of the District of Columbia, the Court, prosecutors, and prospective witnesses,” special counsel Jack Smith’s team wrote in the brief.

“The defendant knows that when he publicly attacks individuals and institutions, he inspires others to perpetrate threats and harassment against his targets,” they wrote.

Still, Trump would be free to otherwise comment on the case, including proclaiming his innocence.

Laurie Levenson, a criminal law professor at Loyola Law School, said it’s a complex matter – requiring balancing between treating Trump like any other criminal defendant and making due First Amendment considerations.

“The court cannot give the message that Donald Trump is not subject to the same legal standards. I think that’s very dangerous,” she said.

“Obviously, Donald Trump doesn’t see remarks the same way others do. And so I’m wondering if this sort of gives enough notice to him as to when he would be crossing the line… . He tends to just speak ad hoc in inflammatory phrases.”....>

<.....Trump immediately made clear he sees the request as an attack on his free speech rights and his campaign.

“Deranged Jack Smith, he’s the prosecutor, he’s a deranged person, wants to take away my rights under the First Amendment,” Trump said during a speech hours after DOJ filed its motion. “He wants to take away my right of speaking freely and openly.”

“Never forget our enemies want to stop us because we are the only ones that can stop them,” the former president continued. “They want to take away my freedom because I will never let them take away your freedom.”

Still, both Levenson and Robbins said Judge Tanya Chutkan will want to establish a record of setting clear guidelines for Trump and warnings of what statements could jeopardize the case.

“I am concerned [about] what’s going to cross the line into disparaging, inflammatory or intimidating. Now DOJ might say for example, ‘like the things that we filed in our motion.’ But you know, he’ll just find a new phrase, so it’s kind of going to be like Whack-a-Mole,” Levenson said of Trump, adding he may need to be warned before a formal order is issued.

“He’ll make an inflammatory statement, the judge will say, ‘warning, not okay.’ You’ll whack that mole; he’ll make another inflammatory statement … . Trying to get him to behave outside the courtroom in a way that we ask people to behave in a courtroom — it’s a long shot. ”

Robbins noted the issue is also more challenging for Chutkan as Trump has also filed an order asking her to recuse herself from the case.

“One of the things which is lurking in the background — and I’m sure his lawyers are mindful of it; he probably is as well — is this motion that she recuse herself. So he knows and his lawyers know the judge has to be careful that in entering any order or responding to this, she doesn’t do something which gives a motion to recuse legs,” he said.

“He and his legal team know that she’s got to be — it’s a particular headache for her. It’s an additional headache for her deciding how to deal with this protective order issue.”

Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor, said Chutkan has already previewed a way to address his speech and dodge the issue of a gag order, noting the judge has already warned she may have to bump up Trump’s March trial date if outside factors like his comments jeopardize the ability to carry out a fair trial in the courtroom.

“I actually think she’s more likely to do that because it’s not reviewable, really, on appeal, and she has wide discretion to do so. And I could see her moving up the trial date as a way of sending a message to Donald Trump rather than getting herself in this challenging situation where she’s trying to police his speech, which is always a tricky situation for a judge to be in,” Mariotti said last week during an appearance on MSNBC.

In some ways, the situation could be a win-win for Trump, who has already sought to politically capitalize on the gag order request, sending a fundraiser telling supporters, “If Joe Biden gets his way, this would be the LAST email I ever send you.”

Trump’s description of the order is not accurate, as he would still be able to discuss the case publicly.

Ford O’Connell, a Florida-based Republican strategist, noted that Trump’s campaign has made a point of pushing the idea that there is a two-tiered system of justice in the country, and a gag order would likely only reinforce the belief among some that he is being unfairly targeted.

“They’ll absolutely rally around him even more than they already have, and he’s essentially the nominee at this point as is,” he said.

While Trump might launch a First Amendment challenge in court and on the campaign trail if an order is issued, Robbins noted the free speech protections are not absolute.

“Although the fact that he’s running for president is extraordinary, it doesn’t change the fundamentals of the precedent: that courts have the inherent authority to protect the fair administration of justice by preventing statements which are reasonably likely to interfere with jury selection, jury seating, or witnesses who are prepared to take the oath and tell the truth,” Robbins said.>

<According to a longtime political consultant who was a victim of a Project Veritas sting that rightwing media networks found so egregious they wouldn't touch it, the collapse of Donald Trump's MAGA movement could repeat the what [sic] happened to Veritas which shut down this past week.

Noting that the organization founded by James O’Keefe dissolved after months of accusations of financial mismanagement by O'Keefe who used it as his "personal piggy bank," Robert Creamer suggested Trump is leading his MAGA adherents down the same path.

"Both Project Veritas and the MAGA movement were built around powerful, egocentric leaders who see themselves as above the law. Both were also constructed on the quicksand of conspiracy theories and lies," he wrote for MSNBC before predicting, "Veritas was brought down by a combination of outside demands for accountability, O’Keefe’s egotistical overreach, and internal divisions. And it appears that a similar fate awaits Trump’s MAGA empire."

After suggesting, "O’Keefe’s willingness to lie and his sense of being above the law were a precursor for Donald Trump when he entered the presidential race," Creamer claimed the similarities go even further.

"O’Keefe allegedly treated Project Veritas’ funds like his own piggy bank — much the way Trump treated the government’s classified documents, which he famously says are 'mine,'" he wrote.

He then added, "Like O’Keefe, Trump is now beginning to be held accountable by the courts and prosecutors who disagree that he is above the law. And now, like the team at Project Veritas, the MAGA Republicans in Congress — and across the country — are increasingly divided, in disarray, at each other’s throats."

"America — and democracy — are safer now that Project Veritas is done. It will be much safer yet when the entire MAGA movement follows Project Veritas into the dustbin of history, " Creamer concluded.>

<The plaintiffs’ arguments in Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. Community Financial Services Association, which the justices will hear on October 3, are simultaneously some of the silliest and some of the most dangerous ideas ever presented to the Supreme Court of the United States.

They claim that an entire federal agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), is unconstitutional. And they do so based on an interpretation of the Constitution that would invalidate Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and countless other federal programs. As the Justice Department notes in one of its briefs, the 2022 legislation funding the federal government contains more than 400 provisions that are invalid under these plaintiffs’ reading of the Constitution.

Perhaps recognizing that the justices are unlikely to declare the majority of all federal spending unconstitutional, the Community Financial plaintiffs then spend much of their brief suggesting arbitrary limits the Court could place on these plaintiffs’ already arbitrary interpretation of the Constitution. Without citing any legal authorities, for example, the Consumer Financial plaintiffs claim that Social Security might be excepted from the new legal regime so long as Congress is careful about how it pays for the Social Security Administration’s staff.

But even with these completely fabricated limits to their completely fabricated reading of the Constitution in place, the Consumer Financial plaintiffs — who are represented by former Trump Solicitor General Noel Francisco — would still do unimaginable harm to the United States of America.

As a brief filed by the banking industry explains to the justices, if the Supreme Court agrees with Francisco’s claim that the CFPB is unconstitutional, the entire US mortgage market could seize up, as banks will have no idea what rules they need to comply with in order to issue loans. Moreover, because home building, home sales, and other industries that depend on the mortgage market make up about 17 percent of the US economy, a decision invalidating the CFPB could trigger economic devastation unheard of since the Great Depression.

Which brings us to the single most outrageous fact about the Consumer Financial case: A three-judge panel of the far-right United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit agreed with the claim that the entire CFPB must be struck down.

Let’s be clear: It is very unlikely that five or more justices will sign onto this nonsense. This isn’t even the first time that a bunch of rogue judges on the Fifth Circuit handed down an opinion that threatened to trigger an economic depression. Seven Fifth Circuit judges did so in a case known as Collins v. Yellen, and, in 2021, the Supreme Court rejected those judges’ arguments in an 8-1 decision.

Nevertheless, Consumer Financial reveals just how deeply delusional thinking has penetrated into the post-Trump federal judiciary. The plaintiffs’ arguments in Consumer Financial have no basis in law, in constitutional text, in precedent, or in rational thought. And they risk the sort of economic catastrophe that the United States hasn’t experienced for nearly a century.

And yet a federal appeals court bought these arguments. So now it’s up to the Supreme Court to save the United States from calamity.

So, what, exactly, are the Consumer Financial plaintiffs’ arguments? This case turns on a provision of the Constitution which provides that “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” As the Supreme Court said in Cincinnati Soap Co. v. United States (1937), this provision “means simply that no money can be paid out of the Treasury unless it has been appropriated by an act of Congress.” That is, before the federal government spends any money, Congress must pass a law permitting it to do so.

The Consumer Financial plaintiffs claim that the CFPB is invalid because it was not properly funded by an act of Congress. But Congress did pass a law, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, which funds the CFPB — and, again, the only limit that the Constitution’s Appropriations Clause places on federal spending is that it must be done pursuant to a federal law.....>

<.....Significantly, as the DOJ notes in its brief, before the Fifth Circuit’s decision in this very case, “no court has ever held that an Act of Congress violated the Appropriations Clause.”

Nevertheless, the Fifth Circuit declared the agency unconstitutional. Much of the Fifth Circuit’s decision rests on the fact that, while Congress did pass a law funding the CFPB, the specific funding mechanism laid out in this law is unusual. Rather than passing a law giving CFPB a lump sum that it can use to fund its operations for a set period of time — as Congress does with some but not all federal agencies — Congress instead provided that the Federal Reserve shall transfer up to 12 percent of its “total operating expenses” to the CFPB each year, upon the CFPB’s request.

This amount is also capped. In 2022, Congress capped CFPB’s funding at $734 million (although the CFPB actually took less than it was allowed to under this cap). This $734 million figure amounts to about 0.01 percent of the total federal budget.

Again, this funding mechanism, where the CFPB’s operating budget first passes through the Federal Reserve before being allocated to the CFPB, is unusual. But laws do not magically become unconstitutional just because they are atypical. Under the Appropriations Clause, Congress may fund a federal agency however it chooses.

Francisco’s brief, meanwhile, asks the justices to impose two new limits on federal spending that are not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution.

First, Francisco argues that the CFPB is unconstitutional because Congress did not appropriate a “specific sum” of money to the agency. Rather than laying out in a statute exactly how much money the CFPB may spend in 2022, for example, Congress said that the CFPB may spend up to $734 million, but that the agency was also allowed to spend less money if did not believe that it needed this entire sum to fund its operations.

Merely describing this argument is enough to refute it. Nothing in the Constitution even suggests that Congress may not permit a federal agency to spend less money than the maximum amount of funds that the legislature has allocated.

If taken seriously, moreover, this argument would invalidate most federal spending, and it would make it impossible for benefit programs like Social Security and Medicare to even exist. As the Justice Department tells the Court, “Congress routinely appropriates sums ‘not to exceed’ a particular amount” and “that phrase appears more than 400 times” in the 2022 legislation funding the federal government. Francisco’s novel reading of the Constitution endangers all of these appropriations.

Under this interpretation of the Constitution, moreover, many key federal programs simply could not exist. Medicare, for example, is a health insurance program that pays for beneficiaries’ health costs as those costs arise. It is impossible for Congress to determine, in advance, the specific dollar amount that Medicare will spend in any given year. To do so, Congress would need to precisely predict which health services would be provided to every senior in the United States, and how much each one of those services would cost.

Second, Francisco argues that the CFPB’s funding structure is unconstitutional because it is “perpetual.” That is, Congress passed a law that funds the CFPB until it passes another law eliminating that funding (CFPB spending is still subject to an annual cap, and that cap rises every year with inflation).

It’s hard to know where to begin with this argument. For starters, nearly two-thirds of all federal spending is “perpetual,” with the bulk of that money going to programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid that are funded by permanent appropriations. Only about 30 percent of all federal spending is “discretionary,” meaning that it is determined every year by an annual appropriations bill.

So, under Francisco’s interpretation of the Appropriations Clause, the vast majority of federal spending is unconstitutional.

Moreover, Francisco’s argument is refuted by the Constitution’s explicit text. While the Appropriations Clause contains no language whatsoever imposing a time limit on federal appropriations, a separate provision of the Constitution provides that no law providing funding to the army “shall be for a longer Term than two Years.”

The authors of the Constitution, in other words, explicitly chose to impose a time limit on army appropriations, and to not impose such a limit on all other appropriations....>

<.....Francisco’s time limit argument also has a practical problem. Even if you agree with him that the framers secretly intended to place an expiration date on all federal spending, what, exactly, is the specific amount of time that may pass before a federal spending bill must sunset? Could Congress pass a law funding the CFPB for five years? What about for 100 years? Or 12 million years? The Constitution does not answer this question, and Francisco doesn’t answer it either.

Even Noel Francisco doesn’t appear to agree with Noel Francisco’s interpretation of the Constitution

Having laid out these two unprecedented and atextual proposed limits on federal spending, Francisco then invents a bunch of limits on his own interpretation of the Constitution — which are no less unprecedented and atextual.

At one point, for example, Francisco seems to suggest that the CFPB is especially unconstitutional because it is a “law enforcement” agency — the CFPB does not just write rules governing lending, it also brings court cases and other actions enforcing various federal laws. Francisco’s implication appears to be that, if the justices don’t want to create the kind of mass chaos that would result if Social Security and Medicare were invalidated, they could still rule in favor of his client by restricting their decision to federal agencies that do law enforcement.

Elsewhere in his brief, Francisco draws a distinction between laws appropriating money for “certain spending programs” and laws that fund a federal agency’s “operating budget.” Under this distinction, Congress could still provide for perpetual funding for Social Security benefits, so long as it does not permanently fund the actual government employees who run the Social Security program....>

<......These proposed limits, of course, appear nowhere in the Constitution. There is nothing whatsoever in the Appropriations Clause, or in any other provision of the nation’s founding document, which even suggests that spending on law enforcement is subject to different rules than other spending, or that federal employee salaries are treated differently than federal benefits.

In any event, the fact that Francisco proposes two novel limits on federal spending, which would fundamentally alter the United States and its government, and then immediately starts backtracking by coming up with arbitrary ways to draw fences around his proposal, should give the justices an extraordinary amount of pause.

Nothing in Francisco’s brief even resembles a legal argument. It’s just a bunch of made-up rules that, until very recently, no court had ever taken seriously.

So, where on earth do these awful arguments even come from?

The Fifth Circuit’s opinion in Consumer Financial mostly paraphrases Judge Edith Jones’s concurring opinion, in a case called CFPB v. All American Check Cashing (2022), which argues that “for Congress’s power of the purse to meaningfully restrain the executive, appropriations to the executive must be temporally bound.” Francisco’s brief also relies heavily on Jones’s All American opinion.

Jones, who President Ronald Reagan appointed to the Fifth Circuit while she was still a thirtysomething former general counsel to the Texas Republican Party, is known for her harsh and often cruel interpretations of federal law. Among other things, she once ruled that a man could be executed after his court-appointed lawyer fell asleep as many as 10 times during his trial for murder. Jones’s views on sexual harassment will make your skin crawl.

Her opinion in All American shows a similar level of sensitivity and rigor. Although it is thick with irrelevant quotes from men discussing the Constitution’s Appropriations Clause — at one point, for example, she quotes James Madison’s statement that “the ‘purse is in the hands of the representatives of the people’ who ‘have the appropriation of all moneys’” — Jones does not appear to cite a single government official, at any level of the federal or any state’s government, who even expressed the idea that the Constitution limits Congress’s power to make permanent appropriations.

Indeed, Jones’s opinion barely demonstrates that any human read the Constitution in this way prior to the All American litigation. Her best evidence that some person, somewhere on the globe, actually had this idea before this lawsuit was filed is a citation to a 1988 law review article, which argues that “Congress abdicates, rather than exercises, its power of the purse if it creates permanent or other open-ended spending authority that effectively escapes periodic legislative review and limitation.”

It is far from clear, in other words, whether Edith Jones’s All American opinion would receive a passing grade if a law student submitted it as their final paper in a law school seminar on congressional appropriations, as it offers no meaningful evidence whatsoever for its central claim.

And yet Jones, Francisco, and several other Fifth Circuit judges would endanger the entire nation’s economy over a theory that has no basis in any legal text, and barely any support in all of the scholarship that has ever been produced by the American legal academy since the Constitution took effect in 1789.

Again, it is highly unlikely that five justices will sign onto this madness. But the fact that any judge would sign their name to this verkakte legal theory — and a total of seven Fifth Circuit judges joined either Jones’ All American opinion, the court’s Consumer Protection opinion, or both — raises serious questions about whether those judges are fit to serve.>

<Donald Trump's admission during a "Meet the Press" interview that he ignored his lawyer's admonishments that he didn't win the 2020 election as he tried to stay in office is a major blow to his legal defense in a trial to be heard by Judge Tanya Chutkan.

According to former Fox News legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano that was an "ouch" moment that will come back to haunt the former president.

In a column published in the Orange County Register, the judge who has been friends with Trump for over 40 years -- and also provided advice during his presidency -- admitted he was surprised that the former president continues to make the lives of his lawyers miserable.

As he noted in his column, a key defense that Trump was reportedly planning to use over his involvement in the Jan 6 insurrection was that his lawyers were in agreement that he had won the election.

"Last week on 'Meet the Press,' Trump revealed that his legal team in the White House told him that he lost the election and there was insufficient evidence to challenge or overturn it. Then he said that he opted to ignore their advice 'because I didn’t respect them.' 'It was my decision,' to do what I did, not theirs. Ouch," he wrote.

According to the retired judge, that defense was "problematic" to begin with based on legal precedent, but after Trump's admission to "Meet the Press" host Kristen Welker it's now completely off the table.

After he wrote, "In order to invoke this defense, Trump will need to call to the witness stand the lawyers whom he told [Attorney John] Lauro gave him legal advice and guided what he did in the days and hours leading up to Jan. 6. He’d then need to have those lawyers explain to the jury that he made full disclosure to them of what he planned to do and received and accepted their advice telling him that the specific course of conduct in which he planned to engage was lawful," he added, "But he just told a national television audience that his lawyers were 'RINOs' (Republicans in name only) and he didn’t respect them. He didn’t say this about Lauro, rather about unnamed lawyers advising him in the White House during the final month of his presidency."

Now, Napolitano maintained, Trump will have a hard time getting them to "testify in his favor."

According to the former judge, that has been a recurring them [sic] as Trump's indictments keep piling up, by which he meant his inability to watch what he says.

"Why does Donald Trump say things that are so harmful to his legal interests? Why does he undercut his own defense in criminal cases that expose him to the potential loss of liberty for the remainder of his life? Does he know that public opinion of him as a candidate or even as president cannot save him in a courtroom?" he asked before concluding,"These are questions juries may soon be answering.">

<These days, the Department of Justice's "special counsels" seem more like special police who would also like to be special judges, juries and executioners. To be considered by Justice Czar Merrick Garland as a "special counsel" appointee, one either has to be a full-blown progressive sycophant, have a full-blown case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, or a combination thereof. While many Republicans sit back and watch -- either because they are shocked by the unprecedented audacity of the progressive weaponization of the DOJ, don't care, or have a touch of Trump Derangement Syndrome themselves -- other Republicans see an urgent need to stop it as soon as possible.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the GOP congresswoman from Georgia, has a plan to stop the DOJ's abuse of special counsels in its tracks. Her plan is appealing in its simplicity: Follow the money, stupid. On Thursday, Greene revealed the idea on the podcast "John Solomon Reports," hosted by John Solomon, founder of the news site Just the News. Green's plan could stop weaponized special counsels such as those of Jack Smith and David Weiss -- the former tasked with destroying Donald Trump so he can never again be president, the latter with protecting President Joe Biden and his son Hunter from being held accountable in the ever-rising tide of corruption, influence-peddling and bribery growing around them. Greene maintains her approach is common sense -- not political but constitutional. In this case, there's no reason it can't be both. The interview is below. The key part starts at about the 8:15 mark....>

<.....In short, Greene wants "to move control of special counsel funding from the Department of Justice to Congress," according to Just the News. "To fund a special counsel right now ... the people that have control of that is the Department of Justice itself," Greene said on the podcast (about the 9:15 mark in the audio above. "You hear people yell, 'Defund Jack Smith,' and I've said it before myself. But we are unable to do it because the Department of Justice controls that slush fund. "My legislation would give Congress the authority and the power to fund special counsels every single year, just like all of our other appropriation bills," she continued. "This is actually the constitutional way, because Congress is in charge of the checkbook, not the Department of Justice itself," Greene said. "I had talked about it with President Trump because I wanted him to understand that this is actually not political, to move it back to Congress. Because the Democrat-controlled Congress would have control of that just as much as a Republican-controlled Congress would have."

By now, the accusations of a two-tiered system of justice over the past couple of years have become common knowledge. From selective prosecutions by special counsel Jack Smith prosecuting Donald Trump in his bid to regain the presidency to the FBI labeling traditional Catholics as "extremists" to U.S. Attorney for Delaware (and now special counsel) David Weiss drawing up a sweetheart deal for Hunter Biden, the DOJ isn't even trying to hide its rabid political bias. Andrew McCarthy -- an author and National Review columnist who served as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and is no fan of Trump -- has taken Weiss' performance apart repeatedly. "The best thing the younger Biden’s defense has going for it is not the Supreme Court," McCarthy wrote in a column on Tuesday. "It’s the prosecutor." National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry penned a piece in August titled, "Jack Smith Is a Fanatic." Lowry wrote that Smith "is in all likelihood a Liz Cheney–style zealot driven by a burning hatred of Donald Trump and all he represents." In other words, the special counsels care about the law only as a means to an end. They'll do whatever they can get away with to get what they want.

Biden's DOJ funding special counsels who look like cornered dogs trying to avoid euthanization is madness. Everyone knows there's not a lot that can be done for a rabid dog but to put it to death. In this case, the best thing to do is to starve them to death by cutting off funds. "I believe that's the right thing to do – to put it back under Congress's authority," Greene said about her plan to move control of special counsel funding from the Department of Justice to Congress. "And it also gives us the power to actually defund Jack Smith or remove David Weiss if we have the financial controls over special counsel." In other words, Greene's plan would sever the most powerful connection between Biden and Smith -- the money that makes Smith's persecutions possible. At the end of August, Greene posted a video on X, the social media platform formerly called Twitter, that shows she's been thinking about the plan for some time. "I will not vote to fund the government if Congress doesn’t do this: - Impeachment Inquiry vote on Joe Biden - Defund Biden’s weaponization of government - Eliminate all COVID vaccine and mandates - No funding for the war in Ukraine," she wrote.

Getting rid of Smith and Weiss would go a long way in defeating Biden's weaponization of government against its own people. And that's something every American should be able to get behind.>

<Of the many targets Donald Trump has attacked over the years, few engender less public sympathy than the career workforce of the federal government—the faceless mass of civil servants that the former president and his allies deride as the “deep state.”

Federal employees have long been an easy mark for politicians of both parties, who occasionally hail their nonpartisan public service but far more frequently blame “Washington bureaucrats” for stifling your business, auditing your taxes, and taking too long to renew your passport. Denigrating the government’s performance is a tradition as old as the republic, but Trump assigned these shortcomings a sinister new motive, accusing the civilian workforce of thwarting his agenda before he even took office.

As he runs again for a second term, Trump is vowing to “dismantle the deep state” and ensure that the government he would inherit aligns with his vision for the country. Unlike during his 2016 campaign, however, Trump and his supporters on the right—including several former high-ranking members of his administration—have developed detailed proposals for executing this plan. Immediately upon his inauguration in January 2025, they would seek to convert thousands of career employees into appointees fireable at will by the president. They would assert full White House control over agencies, including the Department of Justice, that for decades have operated as either fully or partially independent government departments.

Trump’s nearest rivals for the Republican nomination have matched and even exceeded his zeal for gutting the federal government. The businessman Vivek Ramaswamy has vowed to fire as much as 75 percent of the workforce. And Florida Governor Ron DeSantis promised a New Hampshire crowd last month, “We’re going to start slitting throats on day one.”

These plans, as well as the vicious rhetoric directed toward federal employees, have alarmed a cadre of former government officials from both parties who have made it their mission to promote and protect the nonpartisan civil service. They proudly endorse the idea that the government should be composed largely of experienced, nonpolitical employees.

“We’re defenders not of the deep state but of the effective state,” says Max Stier, the CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan organization devoted to strengthening government and the federal workforce. Trump’s drive to eviscerate this permanent bureaucracy, Stier and other advocates fear, will bring about a return to the early American spoils-and-patronage system, wherein jobs were won through loyalty to a party or president rather than merit, and which the century-old laws that created the modern civil service successfully rooted out.

“I can’t overstate my level of concern about the damage this would do to the institution of the federal government,” Robert Shea, a former senior budget official in the George W. Bush administration, told me. “You would have things formerly considered illegal or unconstitutional popping up all across the government like whack-a-mole. And the ability to fight them would be inhibited.”

The Biden administration last week proposed new rules aimed at preventing future attempts to purge the federal workforce, which numbers around 2.2 million people. Even if the regulations are finalized, however, they could be undone by the next president. So defenders of the civil service have been looking elsewhere, trying to mobilize support in Congress and among the broader public. But their effort has not gained much traction, and legislation to protect career employees, roughly 85 percent of whom live outside the Washington, D.C., area, has stalled on Capitol Hill. “I don’t know how much attention the public pays to this type of thing,” laments Jacqueline Simon, the director of public policy for the American Federation of Government Employees.

To Stier, that is precisely the problem. A Clinton-administration veteran who has run the partnership for more than 20 years, he has emerged as perhaps the nation’s most vocal cheerleader of the federal workforce. The partnership bestows awards on top-performing civil servants every year at an Oscars-style gala called the Sammies, and it advises presidential campaigns of both parties—including Trump’s—on the Herculean task of staffing a new administration every four years.

Stier tries to keep his organization rigidly nonpartisan, but he views the proposals from Trump and his conservative allies as a unique threat. “I have never seen anything remotely close to an effort to convert a very large segment of the federal workforce and return to the patronage system,” he told me. “And that’s effectively what you have here.”.....>

<....Stier compared right-wing proposals to overhaul the civil service to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign to weaken the judiciary in Israel. Tens of thousands of Israeli citizens protested in the streets, virtually shutting down the country and forcing Netanyahu to back off. “We have a similar order of threat to our democracy,” Stier said, “and yet not the same level of engagement and involvement as you do there.”

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the right-wing push to dismantle the federal civil service is how open its conservative leaders are about their designs. They are not cloaking their aims in euphemisms about making government more effective and efficient. They are stating unequivocally that federal employees must give their loyalty to the president, and that he or she should be able to remove anyone insufficiently devoted to the cause. The fundamental structure of the executive branch, and the independence with which many of its agencies have operated for decades, these conservatives argue, represents a misreading of the Constitution and a usurping of the president’s power.

“We’re at the 100-year mark with the notion of a technocratic state of dispassionate experts,” Paul Dans, who served as chief of staff of the Office of Personnel Management during the Trump administration, told me. “The results are in: It’s an utter failure.”

Dans is the director of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a $22 million effort to recruit an army of conservative appointees and lay the foundation for what the project hopes will be the next Republican administration. He uses terms like “smash” and “wrecking ball” to describe what conservatives have in mind for the federal government, comparing their effort to the 1984 Apple commercial in which a runner takes down an Orwellian bureaucracy by chucking a sledgehammer at a movie screen.

The project has released a 920-page playbook detailing a conservative policy agenda, including its vision for an executive branch that functions fully under the command of the president. “The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch,” writes Russ Vought, a former director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump, in one section. The president must use “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.” Vought now runs the Center for Renewing America, another organization serving as an incubator for policies that Trump’s allies want to implement if the former president—or another conservative Republican—regains the White House.

At the top of Vought and Dans’s must-do list for the next president: reissuing an executive order that Trump signed during his final months in office—and which President Joe Biden promptly reversed—that would allow the government to remove civil-service protections from as many as 50,000 federal jobs. The move would create a new class of employees known as Schedule F whom the president could fire at will. It would essentially supersize the number of political appointees in senior positions in the government, currently about 4,000.

To Trump’s critics, the Heritage project is an effort to provide intellectual cover for the authoritarian tendencies that he exhibited as president—and which some of his primary competitors, including DeSantis and Ramaswamy, have mimicked.

Vought, however, says the changes are needed to ensure that the government adheres to the results of presidential elections. The federal bureaucracy “is largely unresponsive to the president,” who, he argues, better represents the will of the people. As their prime example of the civil service supposedly run amok, Vought and Dans cite the career of Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who had been lionized by presidents of both parties before becoming a conservative bogeyman under Trump during the coronavirus pandemic. In our interview, Vought compared Fauci to Robert Moses, the notorious New York City parks commissioner who for decades during the 20th century used his unelected positions to exert as much influence as mayors and governors.....>

<....“You’ve got to be able to ensure that those actors are no longer empowered,” Vought said, “unless they truly are going to serve the policy agenda of the president that gets elected by the American people.” Fauci’s status as a career civil servant rather than a political appointee made him difficult—although not impossible—to remove. Trump’s Schedule F would have made it easier.

As OMB director, Vought chafed at the civil service’s opposition to Trump’s decision to bypass Congress and begin building his promised southern border wall by repurposing money appropriated to the Department of Defense. Vought said OMB officials told him the border plan was illegal even after his office’s general counsel had signed off on the idea. “You’re always up against a paradigm shift where people don’t want you to have an opportunity to make policy changes outside of a very clear, confined, very unrisky lane,” Vought said.

To Shea, a fellow Republican who also served as a senior OMB official, such pushback from career employees was a healthy and crucial part of the job. “It was incumbent on the career staff to keep me out of jail,” he said wryly.

By the time Vought left his post, at the end of the Trump administration, he had developed plans to convert 90 percent of OMB’s 535 employees to at-will positions. Even the mere talk of Schedule F, he told me, had resulted in a cultural change at the department, as people “for the first time were understanding that there could be consequences for their resistance.”

No conservative proposal has generated more controversy than the push to remove any separation between the White House and the Department of Justice, where federal prosecutors and agencies like the FBI have long made law-enforcement decisions independently of the president. Jeffrey Clark, the former assistant attorney general who along with Trump was indicted by a Georgia grand jury for his role in attempting to overturn the 2020 election, published a paper online in May titled “The U.S. Justice Department Is Not Independent” for the Center for Renewing America. Paired with Trump’s repeated calls to prosecute Biden and other Democrats, this argument raises the prospect that Trump, if elected again, could effectively order the Justice Department to jail anyone he wants, for no other reason than he has the power to do so as president.

I asked Dans whether a president should be able to direct prosecutions against specific individuals. He initially deflected the question. “That’s happening right now,” he said, accusing Biden of ordering the charges that the Justice Department has brought in two separate cases against Trump—a claim for which there is no evidence.

I changed the topic to Mike Pence. Trump has assailed his former vice president for refusing to help him overturn their defeat, but Pence has never been accused of criminal wrongdoing. Could Trump, as president, simply order the Department of Justice to prosecute him under this theory of presidential power? “Whether a president actually gets into identifying people who ought to be prosecuted, I don’t know if we ever get to that stage,” Dans said. He brought up a different example, arguing that a president could direct prosecutors to go after, say, Mexican drug cartels for their role in the opioid epidemic.

I pressed him one more time on whether Trump could order the prosecution of someone like Pence. The answer wasn’t no.

“I’m not in law school,” Dans replied. “We’re not going to hypotheticals.”

The modern civil service dates back to a presidential assassination nearly 150 years ago. On July 2, 1881, an aspiring diplomat named Charles Guiteau shot President James Garfield at a railroad station in Washington, D.C. Guiteau had become enraged after the new president, inaugurated just four months earlier, had refused to offer him a consulship in Europe as a reward for his help in getting Garfield elected. Garfield’s successor, Chester A. Arthur, signed what became known as the Pendleton Act of 1883, which mandated that federal jobs be awarded based on merit and forbade requirements that prospective hires make political contributions.....>

<.....Defenders of that system now worry that the escalating vilification of the federal workforce will lead to another outbreak of political violence, this time directed at civil servants. Trump has continued to decry the “deep state” with his customary bellicosity, but advocates were aghast after DeSantis took the rhetoric a step further with his promise to begin “slitting throats.” “They’re going to get somebody killed,” Simon, at the American Federation of Government Employees, told me, ridiculing DeSantis as “a weak little man trying to sound strong and scary.”

Unions representing federal employees have been lobbying Congress to pass a bill that would prevent future administrations from implementing Schedule F and stripping career employees of their job protections.

The proposal has received scant Republican support, however. “If we had a floor vote on this today, I don’t know that I could get it passed in either the House or the Senate,” one of the proposal’s lead sponsors, Democratic Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, told me. Kaine said he is trying to attach the bill to one of the must-pass spending bills that Congress will likely approve before the end of the year, but that appears to be a long shot.

Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma, the top Republican on the Senate subcommittee overseeing the federal workforce, has criticized the incendiary rhetoric directed toward government workers. But he told me he thinks Congress should debate proposals like Schedule F to determine whether some of the career workforce should be converted to at-will appointees. “There should be more political appointees. I don’t know exactly what that number is,” Lankford said. “It’s not tens of thousands.”

With Congress unlikely to act, the Biden administration last week unveiled its new regulations aimed at thwarting the return of Schedule F. The proposed rule would “clarify and reinforce” existing protections for civil servants, forbidding changes that would take away a career employee’s status without their consent. It would also establish new procedures that the government would have to follow before converting career employees to at-will appointees. The regulations, Deputy OPM Director Robert Shriver told me, represent “what we think is the strongest action we can take under our existing authority.”

The likely effect is that once finalized, the new regulations would slow—but not altogether stop—a future Republican administration from implementing Schedule F. “Can it be undone? Yes, it could be undone,” said Stier, who emphasized that legislation was a preferred route.

Complicating the conservative push to dramatically increase the number of political appointments is the fact that administrations of both parties—and Trump’s in particular—have struggled to hire people to fill the approximately 4,000 appointed positions that already exist. Beyond the concerns about whether an administration should prioritize political loyalty over merit in hiring, former officials say the increase in turnover such a change would bring would simply be bad for the government and, as a result, the public. “We can’t change the leadership of an organization every three or six years and expect the organization to perform in an outstanding way,” says Robert McDonald, the former CEO of Procter & Gamble and a longtime Republican whom President Barack Obama nominated to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2014. “You’ve got to have continuity of leadership.”

That doesn’t much concern Dans, who downplayed the importance of government experience in his recruitment drive for the next Republican administration. “I’m fully confident that the American people have the skills and have the ability to do these government jobs. It’s not rocket science,” he told me. (“Rocket science may be some of the simpler things they do,” Stier retorted.)

The fight to defend the very existence of the civil service is particularly frustrating for Stier, who has spent the bulk of his career forging a bipartisan consensus in support of the federal workforce. He and the Partnership for Public Service have pushed the government to improve its performance, especially in areas visible to the public. They’ve advocated for changes that would grant presidents more power over appointments by making fewer positions subject to Senate confirmation. Another idea would increase accountability for civil servants by making them earn the protections of tenured service rather than receiving them automatically a year into their employment.

“We can do better,” Stier told me. “But doing better is not burning the house down.”>

<Michigan Republican Party chair Kristina Karamo this weekend reportedly pushed back against those challenging her leadership, telling them to "pound sand" as she attacked evolution.

Karamo, who earlier this year called on supporters of former President Donald Trump to put "the fear of God" into state Attorney General Dana Nessel, appeared at the Michigan GOP's biennial leadership conference this weekend. An event typically catering to top political talent was taken over by far-right extremists this year, according to local reports.

"Even as attendance cratered and many elected Republicans steered clear, a faction of Michigan Republicans convened on Mackinac Island this weekend for the party’s biennial leadership conference, celebrating a community that embraced the same conspiracy theories and ultra-conservative policies," the report states.

"Chair Kristina Karamo, while lambasting the theory of evolution, dispelled rumors she was planning to resign," the article states.

It continues:

“Those who wish to maintain the status quo and manage inefficiently are angry that I’m chair,” she said, according to MLive. “Pound sand.”

The report also states:

"Speakers pushed theories of widespread election fraud and railed against vaccines, globalists and the 'uniparty.' Charles Thurston, a speaker that claimed to unify the bible and medicine, appeared at the podium wearing the mask of a medieval plague doctor and a tri-cornered hat, ringing a bell to skewer the pandemic response."

According to another news story, Karamo said Darwin's theory of evolution is a fraud and a hoax, yet leftists cling to evolutionary theory because "when children are taught that one part of the Bible is false, they are more inclined to also question its other teachings.">

Hahahahaha!

<Donald Trump said on Sunday that he intends to thoroughly scrutinize and limit NBC News and other news agencies if he's re-elected president in 2024.

Trump, who recently had an interview on NBC in which some people said he made accidental confessions about his federal cases, lashed out about NBC news and its affiliates

"They are almost all dishonest and corrupt, but Comcast, with its one-side and vicious coverage by NBC NEWS, and in particular MSNBC, often and correctly referred to as MSDNC (Democrat National Committee!), should be investigated for its 'Country Threatening Treason,'" Trump wrote on Sunday.

The former president added that their "endless coverage of the now fully debunked SCAM known as Russia, Russia, Russia, and much else, is one big Campaign Contribution to the Radical Left Democrat Party."

He promised to seek retribution once in office again.

"I say up front, openly, and proudly, that when I WIN the Presidency of the United States, they and others of the LameStream Media will be thoroughly scrutinized for their knowingly dishonest and corrupt coverage of people, things, and events," he said, arguably challenging the very notion of an American free press. "Why should NBC, or any other of the corrupt & dishonest media companies, be entitled to use the very valuable Airwaves of the USA, FREE? They are a true threat to Democracy and are, in fact, THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE! The Fake News Media should pay a big price for what they have done to our once great Country!">