<U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida Judge Aileen Cannon doesn't have a leg to stand on as she battles the Department of Justice over proceeding with the federal case filed by special counsel Jack Smith against Donald Trump for obstruction of justice.

That is the opinion of law Professor Stephen Gillers of New York University who told Newsweek that the Trump-appointed jurist is making suspect rulings that may not rise to the point where Smith could successfully have her removed — but are baffling nonetheless.

This past week Cannon snapped at DOJ officials who filed a brief warning she is being manipulated by the former president's attorneys who appear to be seeking to delay the Mar-a-Lago stolen documents case until after the 2024 presidential election.

According to Gillers, Cannon has an open and shut case that shouldn't take near the time she insists will be needed to bring it to a conclusion.

"It is hard to understand what Cannon is thinking," he told Newsweek's Sean O'Driscoll before adding, "Is she worried about the [Washington] trial going on too long and hitting up against the present start date for her trial? If so, she should wait to see if that happens. She can then delay her start date later. Trials often take less time than the lawyers predict."

According to the legal expert, the obstruction case isn't nearly as "complex" as she appears to be making it out to be and her concerns are suspect and should be questioned.

"Does she believe that the case is too complicated to try as soon as May, even though the lawyers have had months to prepare and will have six more months before May? That's not credible," he explained while also noting that the Trump federal trial being overseen in Washington, D.C. by Judge Tanya Chutkan "is much more complicated than the documents trial," was filed at a later date and yet is proceeding swiftly.>

<Justice Samuel Alito is the tip of the spear for conservatives challenging the Biden administration during oral arguments at the Supreme Court.

He’s a fierce questioner, ready to trap advocates in their arguments. And he becomes demonstrably riled when he fails to get the answer he wants. He shakes his head and rolls his eyes.

Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar is the Biden administration’s top lawyer at the court, defending the policies that are the source of much of Alito’s consternation. She responds to him with a steady pitch and precision. And she is not derailed by what he puts down.

Their jousting over issues such as abortion, vaccines, and all manner of regulatory power offers some of the most riveting exchanges heard these days at America’s high court.

When excerpts from their Supreme Court audio appear on YouTube or other social media, it attracts thousands of views, sometimes hundreds of thousands, as court-watchers debate who got the better of the argument.

Their back-and-forth provides more than drama in the white marble setting. Prelogar, 43, argues the government’s most consequential cases. And the exchanges with Alito, 73, have the potential to influence other justices and affect whether the government wins or loses.

Prelogar will be at the lectern on Tuesday in a major Second Amendment case, defending a law that prohibits persons subject to domestic violence protective orders from possessing a firearm.

Alito, a Trenton, New Jersey, native, once stood at the lectern that Prelogar commands today.

After graduating from Princeton and Yale Law School, he joined the Department of Justice and spent about five years in the early 1980s in the solicitor general’s office. President Ronald Reagan named Alito a US attorney in New Jersey and President George H.W. Bush tapped him for a prestigious appellate court post in 1990. President George W. Bush elevated Alito to the high court in January 2006, to succeed the retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

Prelogar, who grew up in Boise, Idaho, graduated from Emory University and then Harvard Law School. As a teen she entered state pageants and won the Miss Idaho title in 2004. She said she used the pageant scholarship money for law school.

“If you want to look at a through-line here, I like to go in front of judges,” Prelogar said recently about the experience on NPR’s “Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” The early pageant work may also contribute to her ease at the courtroom lectern and economy of language, shed of the usual “ums” and “ahs” that plague many lawyers.

Prelogar first became familiar with the inner workings of the Supreme Court as a law clerk to liberal Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan. From 2014 to 2019, Prelogar was an assistant to the solicitor general arguing less prominent cases before the justices, and was separately detailed to an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, under special counsel Robert Mueller. In 2021, President Joe Biden nominated her to be US solicitor general, and the Senate confirmed Prelogar by a vote of 53-36. Only six Republicans joined Democrats to approve her.

Unprecedented, but to what end?

Supreme Court oral arguments always begin with some element of suspense: How effectively will lawyers at the lectern make their case and what will justices reveal of their own views? The justices sometimes use these public sessions to press their own positions, with statements cloaked as questions, essentially beginning their negotiations with colleagues.

Any lawyer arguing a progressive position, as Prelogar regularly does, faces an uphill climb, because of the court’s conservative supermajority. For about a half century, the court was generally 5-4, conservative-liberal. Since 2020, it has been 6-3 conservative-liberal.

A few weeks ago, Alito and Prelogar sparred over a federal agency established to protect consumers from risky mortgages, auto loans and credit card deals.

The case began when payday lenders challenged the constitutionality of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s funding structure. Congress – seeking to ensure the agency’s independence – required it to be financed annually through the Federal Reserve System (which itself is funded through bank fees), rather than regular congressional appropriations.

It was a spirited argument, although the intensity in the courtroom as Alito challenged Prelogar’s justifications may be lost a bit in the cool words from a transcript.....>

<.....“There have been agencies funded this way for every year of this nation’s history,” Prelogar told the justices, as she defended the bureau established after the country’s 2008 financial crisis.

“What is your best historic, your single best example, of an agency that has all of the features that the CFPB has …” Alito asked in one of his series of queries.

“I think our best example historically is the Customs Service,” Prelogar responded. “The first Congress created the Customs Service in 1789. It gave the Customs Service a standing, uncapped source of funding from the revenues that the Customs Service collected.”

Not satisfied, Alito continued: “What’s your best example of an agency that draws its money from another agency that, in turn, does not get its money from a congressional appropriation in the normal sense of that term but gets it from the private sector?”

“I can’t give you another example of a source that’s precisely like that one,” Prelogar said, “but I would dispute the premise that that could possibly be constitutionally relevant. This is a case about Congress’s own prerogatives over the purse, its authority.”

“So,” Alito declared, “I take it your answer is that you do not … But you think that to the extent it is unprecedented, it is unprecedented in a way that is not relevant for present purposes? Is that your answer?”

“Yes, primarily,” Prelogar said, adding with a bit of cheek. “I think it would be unprecedented in a way that you could say this is the only agency that has the acronym CFPB. That’s obviously true also, but it doesn’t track the constitutional value.”

Overcoming nerves

Chief Justice John Roberts, who before becoming a justice also served in the solicitor general’s office and then as a private appellate attorney, was a superb advocate himself. Known for rigorous preparation, he was clear and conversational.

Roberts also acknowledged over the years how nerve-wracking it was. His hands would often shake before he stood up to argue, subdued once he grasped the sides of the lectern and began his presentation.

From the bench, Roberts is a tough questioner of Prelogar and Biden administration policy, but without the palpable antagonism that often comes from Alito.

During a January 2022 argument over a Biden Covid-19 vaccine requirement for federal workers, Alito began a set of questions with a tone that was alternately aggrieved and assured. He held the upper hand, as a majority of his colleagues were similarly skeptical about the reach of government power.

“I don’t want to be misunderstood in making this point because I’m not saying the vaccines are unsafe. The FDA has approved them. It’s found that they’re safe. It’s said that the benefits greatly outweigh the risks. I’m not contesting that in any way. I don’t want to be misunderstood. I’m sure I will be misunderstood. I just want to emphasize I’m not making that point,” Alito said.

“But,” Alito continued, as he confidently addressed Prelogar, “is it not the case that these vaccines and every other vaccine of which I’m aware and many other medications have benefits and they also have risks and that some people who are vaccinated and some people who take medication that is highly beneficial will suffer adverse consequences? Is that not true of these vaccines?”

“That can be true,” Prelogar said, “but, of course, there is far, far greater risk from being unvaccinated, by orders of magnitude.”

“But … there is some risk,” Alito interjected. “Do you dispute that?”

“There can be a very minimal risk with respect to some individuals, but, again, I would emphasize that there would be no basis to think that these FDA-approved and authorized vaccines are not safe and effective. They are the single-most effective.”

Alito cut her off: “No, I’m not making that point. I tried to make it as clear as I could. I’m not making that point. I’m not making that point. I’m not making that point. There is a risk, right? Has OSHA ever imposed any other safety regulation that imposes some extra risk, some different risk, on the employee?

Prelogar: “I can’t think of anything else that’s precisely like this, but I think that to suggest that OSHA is precluded from using the most common, routine, safe, effective, proven strategy to fight an infectious disease at work would be a departure from how this statute should be understood.”

As the two continued, talking over each other, they challenged the transcription service based on how many broken sentences and dashes were recorded.

When a clip of that exchange over the vaccine requirement of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) was posted online, more than 500,000 people viewed it, and more than 6,000 people left comments.

The administration lost by a 6-3 vote along ideological lines....>

<.....Affirmative action and ‘the nation that we aspire to be’

Jeffrey Wall, who was a top official in the solicitor general’s office during the Trump administration, said the Biden solicitor general necessarily faces “headwinds with … a court that is more generally skeptical of government power.”

Speaking at a Practising Law Institute review in August, Wall overall praised the solicitor general’s record. “I think that General Prelogar should feel pretty good, all things considered, about how the term went,” he said.

Wall referred to the high-profile administration loss in the Harvard and University of North Carolina affirmative action cases last session, saying that “no one believes that those cases could have turned on the SG’s advocacy.”

The affirmative action arguments offered several Alito-Prelogar moments of tension. The Biden administration was backing admissions practices that considered students’ race as a factor in admissions to achieve campus diversity.

Prelogar highlighted repercussions for the military if racial affirmative action was eliminated at the service academies or colleges with ROTC programs that prepare officer candidates.

“What about a college that does not have a ROTC program,” Alito interjected, homing in on what he plainly saw as a specious ROTC reference and larger appeal to the military interest. “Would a plan that would be permissible at a college that has a program be impermissible at the latter, at the one that doesn’t have the ROTC program?”

“We’re not asking the court to draw that distinction,” Prelogar told Alito, asserting that the government’s interest extends “more broadly to other federal agencies, to the federal government’s employment practices itself, and to having a set of leaders in our country who are trained to succeed in diverse environments.”

“Well,” Alito countered, “then I don’t understand the relevance of what you’re saying about the link between college education either at a service academy or a school with an ROTC program and the needs of the military if it doesn’t matter whether the school has no ROTC program and therefore trains no officers.”

Prelogar said the military’s interest in diversity was not confined to the service academies. “We believe deeply in the value of diversity and in universities being able to obtain the educational benefits that correlate with diversity,” she said.

Alito later seized on Prelogar’s attempt to persuade the court to look at “the nation that we aspire to be”; he suggested the approach rang hollow.

“For corporate America,” Prelogar had said as she concluded her arguments in the dispute, “diversity is essential to business solutions. For the medical community and scientific researchers, diversity is an essential element of innovation and delivering better health outcomes.”

Alito told Prelogar it appeared she wanted to take the controversy at hand involving education and extend it to employment. “Is that right?” he asked.

“No, Justice Alito,” Prelogar said. “I was trying to make the observation that the experience of students in those four years of college have effects on the course of their life.”....>

<....“Then why were you talking about corporate America,” he rejoined.

“Because corporate America,” she said, “like the United States military, relies on having a diverse pipeline of individuals who had the experience of learning in a diverse educational environment and who themselves reflect the diversity of the American population.”

In the end, Harvard and the University of North Carolina, along with the Biden administration, lost the dispute by a 6-3 vote along the familiar ideological lines. Roberts, who wrote for the majority opinion that was signed by Alito and the other justices on the right wing, added a footnote that said the decision did not apply to West Point and the other military academies. (Students for Fair Admissions, the group that started the Harvard and University of North Carolina lawsuits, recently filed cases against the service academies.)

In fair Verona

To be sure, not all Alito-Prelogar matchups end with ideological divisions. And indeed one of their earliest encounters found the two aligned, in a true theatrical situation, as the Washington-based Shakespeare Theatre Company staged a mock trial in December 2016.

The Romeo and Juliet tragedy was at the center of the mock case as it tested a wrongful death lawsuit brought by their parents (the Montagues and Capulets) against Friar Laurence, who had secretly married the young couple then helped Juliet fake her death.

Alito presided as the “chief justice” with four “associate justices,” two of whom happened to be then-lower court judges Brett Kavanaugh and Ketanji Brown Jackson (eventually elevated to the real Supreme Court).

Prelogar defended the Friar. Befitting the general theater audience and timing after the November 2016 election, her defense included various political and pop culture (Taylor Swift) references.

Of Friar Lawrence, Prelogar said at one point, “He just wanted to make Verona great again.” Then she delivered her closing remarks in a sonnet form, “because Iambic pentameter is exceedingly persuasive.”

After the mock panel deliberated, Alito and the others returned to the bench to deliver their ruling. He praised the lawyers on both sides of the case. “From now on,” he quipped, “I’m going to expect all the briefs from the solicitor general’s office to be in iambic pentameter.”

He then announced that Prelogar had prevailed in her defense of the Friar. Referring to the fact that the audience had separately taken its own vote, Alito joked, “Since this is a principality, it really doesn’t matter how the people voted.”

Prelogar, it turned out, won that vote, too.>

<Marcia Mansaray has lived in Ottawa County, Michigan, her entire life: growing up, going to college, marrying and raising her children there. She thought she knew it well. But over the past several years, she said, she has watched her middle-class, family-oriented, historically Dutch community on the shores of Lake Michigan abandon the principles she always thought it held dear.

Mansaray, 59, had always voted Republican. For her, conservatism meant taking care of people and treating people with respect. That changed in the 2016 presidential election. "I could not vote for Donald Trump. I thought, 'This man has no character. I can't vote for him.'"

But ever since Trump won and transformed the Republican Party in his image, she has felt like her whole life and worldview have been under attack. A far-right Republican insurgency now controls her local government, and the rifts that have grown over the past few years are still tearing her community apart.

"We're in this very divisive environment in our country," she said. "And I feel like we're living that right here."

Many of Mansaray's neighbors feel the same. Political shifts in her home region of western Michigan helped flip the state blue in 2020, helping to deliver Joe Biden the presidency. But rather than moderate in order to win back voters like Mansaray, the state Republican Party has doubled down on a far-right, pro-Trump agenda. That could help push more voters toward Democrats in 2024 — or the protests and political vendettas currently roiling Ottawa County could be a sign of what's to come nationally if Trump is reelected.

A party in tatters

For decades, western Michigan rode or died with the Republican Party. But in recent years, both its voters and its party leaders have distanced themselves from Trump and the new GOP he represents. In the 2016 Republican primary, Sen. Ted Cruz defeated Trump in this part of the state; the 19.5 percent of the vote that Trump received in Ottawa County was lower than any other county in Michigan. In 2019, then-Republican Rep. Justin Amash, who is from nearby Grand Rapids, left the party entirely. At the time, he said modern politics was trapped in a "partisan death spiral."

After Amash left office in 2021, the heir of a local grocery store chain, Peter Meijer, took his seat and carried on Amash's maverick tradition. Meijer was one of 10 House Republicans to vote to impeach Trump after the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Lambasted by Trump loyalists for his vote, Meijer was primaried in 2022 by John Gibbs, a former missionary and software engineer who'd served in Trump's administration. Gibbs won the primary, but his extreme views and comments doomed him in the general election. He lost to now-Rep. Hillary Scholten, the first Democrat to win a Grand Rapids-based congressional seat in nearly 50 years.

It was part of a seismic victory for Democrats around the state. Two years earlier, Biden had reversed Trump's 2016 victory in Michigan with a slim majority of 51 percent. In the 2022 midterms, Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson were reelected by double-digit margins, and, unexpectedly, Democrats won control of both the state House and Senate for the first time in nearly 40 years.

Many factors contributed to the Democrats' sweep, but a big one was far-right Republican candidates who pushed moderates toward Democrats. Gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon aired conspiracy theorists on her conservative talk show. Secretary of state candidate Kristina Karamo claimed the 2020 election was stolen, opposed vaccines and called abortion "child sacrifice.".....>

<....Yet rather than moderate after its midterm losses, the state GOP has gone further to the right. Earlier this year, the party elected Karamo as its head. Since then, the Michigan GOP has imploded with infighting over the future of the party. Big donors have pulled out, leaving the party nearly broke. One county meeting led to a physical altercation and assault charges.

Seth Getz, a longtime Republican who ran for a western Michigan state House seat in 2022 and lost his primary, said he feels like a conservative without a party. "I still have these ideas that I've always attributed to Republicans," he said — ideas about trying to solve society's problems with the lightest, leanest good governance possible. Yet "somehow, Republicans have shifted and have left me behind." But many of the new guard in Michigan, those loyal to Karamo, told me that "country-club" traditionalists were just upset that the party was taken over by grassroots activists, those who came into politics inspired by Trump's presidency.

This September's Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference, held biennially at the palatial Victorian Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, showed a party under strain. The Detroit News reported that the conference drew only 300 to 800 people, compared with 1,500 to 2,000 in previous years. Meshawn Maddock, a former co-chair of the state party who has been charged with allegedly serving as one of Trump's fake electors in Michigan, told me that the people who didn't come to the event because they didn't like the current leadership were sore losers. "My husband and I came here when we did not like party leadership," she said. In the past, she said, she supported general-election candidates she hadn't voted for in the primary, like Mitt Romney and John McCain, for the good of the party — and now everyone else needed to do the same. "Donald Trump is that candidate, is going to win the nomination, so they need to get on board."

For Republicans like Maddock, there's no reason for the GOP to moderate to try to win back votes. Speakers at the conference concentrated on their still-simmering outrage over the COVID-19 lockdowns and what they see as a stolen 2020 election. The lockdowns in particular were a divisive flashpoint in Michigan, leading to a plot to kidnap Whitmer, and are still an animating issue for voters. "That is the best example we have of government overreach," said state Sen. Jonathan Lindsey. "People talk about, 'What does tyranny look like?' People talk about, 'What if the government were to do really terrible things, like take a heavy hand toward businesses or individuals?'" For many Michigan Republicans, the COVID-19 shutdowns were an example of that tyranny. And a group of them in Ottawa County decided to do something about it.

'A vendetta against the health department'

Three years ago, Mansaray was just like everyone, everywhere: trying to learn how to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. Like most states, Michigan shuttered businesses and schools during the first wave of the virus. As the deputy health officer for Ottawa County's Department of Public Health, Mansaray was one of the faces of local efforts to follow state regulations, like mask mandates and business closures.

That's when the local battles began.

According to Mansaray and several other residents, Joe Moss, a self-described businessman and entrepreneur from Hudsonville, was incensed over these COVID-19 regulations, especially closing schools and masking children. He, a former small-business owner named Sylvia Rhodea and other like-minded residents began to organize and founded a group called Ottawa Impact to, according to its website, "preserve and protect the individual rights of the people in Ottawa County" and "oppose indoctrination of our county's youth and the politicization of public schools." (Moss, Rhodea and other Ottawa Impact members did not respond to our interview requests.)

Kim Nagy, a Democratic leader in the county, said she first became aware of Ottawa Impact when it volunteered to take over sponsorship of the 2021 Memorial Day parade. "It was overtly political," Nagy said. There was a Trump float and an anti-vaccine float, Nagy and others said. "It was not the Memorial Day parade that we were used to, which really honored veterans," Nagy said.

The next year, Ottawa Impact endorsed a slate of candidates for nine of the 11 seats on the county Board of Commissioners, the governing body of Ottawa County. Their slogan was "Faith, Family, Freedom," and each of the candidates had similar looking signs and coordinated campaigns. They aired ads on local radio. They signed a "Contract with Ottawa," making promises about how they would govern.....>

<.....It was an unusual amount of effort for the normally sleepy local races, and it paid off. Eight of the Ottawa Impact candidates won their primaries over more traditional Republicans, and they won the subsequent general elections with little Democratic opposition. The insurgent conservative group had taken control of county government. Moss became chair of the Board of Commissioners, Rhodea the vice-chair. (However, two Ottawa Impact-endorsed winners have since announced they have cut ties with the group.)

During what is normally a routine, rules-setting meeting in their first January in office, the new commissioners wasted no time remaking county government. They changed the county motto from "Where You Belong" to "Where Freedom Rings." They closed the county's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Department. They fired the longtime county administrator and, without posting the job opening and conducting a search for the position, hired Gibbs, who'd just lost his election for Congress. They tried to fire Adeline Hambley, who'd just been named the head of the health department, but she sued and has kept her job while the case makes its way through the courts.

The moves shocked the county. "I don't think people even realized what county commissioners did," Beth Parker, a 71-year-old retired preschool teacher who helped start a nonpartisan group called the Zeeland Area Action Committee to oppose Ottawa Impact. "It was that smooth of a business, they just knew what they were doing. And there weren't a lot of stones in the road."

And that was only the beginning. As the year's budgeting process began, Hambley felt that the questions and discussions normally held between the county administrator, the board and the departments were missing. The health department submitted its normal budget request in January, asking for $6.4 million from the county, and waited to hear questions or concerns. They never came.

In August, the Board of Commissioners proposed cutting the county's contribution to the health department by almost two-thirds, to $2.5 million. The amount was so low that Hambley argued it would shut down the health department.

Moss claimed the board was trying to return the health department's budget to pre-pandemic levels for reasons of fiscal responsibility, but Hambley argued that the proposed budget was less than what it had been in 2009. And the county wasn't facing declining revenue. The money that had gone to the health department was reallocated to the Department of Veterans Affairs. "It's like they're here for a vendetta against the health department," Mansaray said.

Protests broke out across the county, with people for and against the budget cuts coming out to support their side. It wasn't just partisan: The cuts, firings, and other activities not only brought out the county's Democratic minority, but also pitted moderate Republicans like Mansaray against the insurgents, just like at the state level.

Some of the fights even turned personal. "We all used to be able to sit down, you know — we'd go have drinks together and hang out," Nagy said. "And you knew that you weren't on the same page in terms of political philosophy, or programs, or policy. But you did not view people who were of the other party with suspicion. You didn't think that it was OK to call them things like 'groomer.' That stuff didn't go on, and now it does."

Nick Brock, who helped found a nonpartisan group called Vote Common Good: West Michigan, said he noticed the rhetoric getting heated during the anti-mask protests throughout the pandemic. "How they were talking about it wasn't in terms of partisan politics, of Republicans versus Democrats. It was this great, spiritual warfare that was going on. It was 'the good versus the evil.'" The fight over the health department funding had become a stand-in for bigger fights over the direction of the county and the nation.

In the face of the protests, the commissioners relented — a bit. But Ottawa Impact had still made its mark. The budget that finally passed, at the end of September, provided the health department with $4.8 million. As a result, six staff members have already been laid off, and cuts to other services are still expected.

In September, Moss spoke to a local conservative talk show radio host, Justin Barclay, and defended his and the board’s actions. He said that he was simply enacting the agenda that Ottawa County had voted for. And on his campaign website, he criticized the “constant barrage of false narratives and defamation” against Ottawa Impact. “It is my pleasure to stand between the Left and the people of Ottawa County,” he wrote.....>

<....The personal toll of politics

Mansaray and her husband Alpha live in a neat, modern house in a new development, full of both occupied homes and houses still under construction. The house is decorated with photos of the Mansarays smiling and close, Marcia's hair graying over the years.

Mansaray had always thought everyone fit in in Ottawa County — that it truly was a place where everyone belonged. But when Mansaray met Alpha in 2013, her worldview started to shift. He'd been born in Sierra Leone, was a practicing Muslim and came to Michigan to attend college. One of his children had autism, and another came out as transgender. Through them, Mansaray learned more about what it was like to come to western Michigan as an outsider. Now, she has come to realize the truth of something Alpha said: "We are in the same space, but the experience is different."

"Our family is very diverse," Mansaray said. "We have a lot of elements about us that Ottawa Impact doesn't like. And when they got rid of the DEI office and called 'Where You Belong' Marxist ideology, without explaining it, that said something to me and my family."

Mansaray still carries around a mug printed with the county's former motto. But even she sometimes feels like a stranger in the place she has always called home. She couldn't believe people she grew up with weren't celebrating advances like vaccines and weren't taking science and public health seriously. She was shocked and scared when she even started receiving personal threats. "A guy who owns a gun shop … said, 'I am selling way more guns and ammo than I've ever seen in my life,'" she said. "And he goes, 'People don't like you. You need to watch your back when you go out to your car.'"

Now, the Mansarays are thinking of leaving the county, and maybe the country. Because what's happening in Ottawa County is part of a nationwide trend. Many other local and state governments are seeing moves to install Trump loyalists in positions of power, battles over DEI offices, lingering anti-vaccine sentiment and other culture war issues. Mansaray feels like Ottawa County is a warning for the whole country, as far-right politics gains a foothold. "Gosh, you know, it feels a lot like fascism," she said. "It really does. I mean, it's so extreme. It's religious extremism, and that's scary."

At the same time, the extremism that's alienating Mansaray, and causing chaos in the state Republican Party, may also help turn once-red strongholds like western Michigan blue. Vaccine skepticism, attacks on diversity initiatives and election denialism may motivate a small group of conservatives, but they're unpopular among virtually everyone else. Trump's narrow victory in Michigan in 2016 helped deliver him the presidency: Now, loyalty to Trump in the state may be his party's undoing, and may help deliver the 2024 election to the Democrats.>

<Such triple posted mass kissing barf is a standard menu item that should have already been removed three times. Where are the editors? Where are the techies? What's wrong with the whistle?? They're too busy selectively harassing my account and a few others. Why free userz who have no interest in chess (as well as dishonest, attention seeking trollz hiding behind multiple aliases) are allowed to trash this chess website with frequent multiple dumps as above is bewildering and then some. The monitoring, the standard of expectation is so poor, so lacking, so off-guide, and not at all good for the chess community. We're nuts to pay for this garbage. Chessgames continues to advertize one thing but does another.

More blatant smooch, smooch, smooching to come (so poster will be allowed to continue breaking the guidelines to spew political intolerance and harass other members>

<A federal judge has dismissed Brett Favre’s defamation lawsuit against Shannon Sharpe, ruling that Sharpe’s comments on a sports broadcast were constitutionally protected speech.

Favre sued Sharpe over statements made on the show “Skip and Shannon: Undisputed,” where Sharpe criticized Favre’s connection to a welfare misspending case in Mississippi.

The judge determined that Sharpe’s comments were rhetorical hyperbole and not meant to be taken literally.

“Similarly, Sharpe’s use of the words ‘people that really needed that money,’ the ‘lowest of the low,’ and ‘the underserved,’ again are examples of protected, colorful speech referring to needy families in Mississippi,” the judge wrote.

“Here, no reasonable person listening to the Broadcast would think that Favre actually went into the homes of poor people and took their money — that he committed the crime of theft/larceny against any particular poor person in Mississippi,” Starrett wrote. Favre has filed defamation lawsuits against other individuals involved in the case, including the state auditor and a former NFL punter.

Favre has repaid $1.1 million received for speaking fees related to the misspent welfare money.>

<Donald Trump randomly pulled a piece of paper out of his suit jacket during testimony in Manhattan court Monday — claiming it would completely clear his name in the $250 million civil fraud case against him and asking to show it to the judge.

The former president, 77, was apparently requesting to show both the judge and a prosecutor a disclaimer clause from a financial statement that New York Attorney General Letitia James has accused him on lying on in her lawsuit.

As he testified at trial in the suit, Trump held the document up and asked if the judge, would “like to have it.”

Later, the real estate tycoon said: “I would love to read this, Your Honor, if I could?”

“Not at this point, not at this point,” replied Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron — who is deciding the non-jury case that threatens Trump’s New York real estate empire.

“I’m shocked,” Trump responded.

One of Trump’s main defenses during his testimony revolved around the annual statements of financial condition which James claims he lied on from 2011 through 2021, inflating his assets by billions a year for better loan and insurance terms.

Trump claimed that a disclaimer clause meant that he wasn’t liable for any inaccuracies the documents might contain – though Engoron, in a bombshell ruling before the trial began last month, shot down that particular defense argument.

Donald Trump pulled out a piece of paper from his suit jacket while he was testifying, saying it would clear him in a fraud suit. “I think that the statements of financial conditions were very good, were actually somewhat conservative, and they were totally protected, and so was I, by the disclaimer clause,” Trump insisted from the witness stand Monday afternoon.

The yearly statements contained a section saying that Trump promised to provide a “fair representation” of the financial filings in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles.

Engoron wrote in his Sept. 26 decision that the disclaimers “do no [sic] insulate defendants from liability” — and added that they actually even “put the onus for accuracy squarely on defendants’ shoulders.”

On Monday, referring to the disclaimer clause, the judge told Trump to “read about my opinion — for the first time, I guess.”

The debate over the clause prompted Trump to explode on the stand and lash out at the judge and the AG.

Trump claimed that a disclaimer clause on his statements of financial conditions — at the heart of the fraud case — cleared him of an inaccuracies in the documents.

“He called me a fraud and he didn’t know anything about me!” yelled Trump, while pointing at the judge.

“The fraud is on the court and not on me… the fraud is on her!”

He then called James, who sat calmly in the front row, a “political hack.”

Trump used myriad other arguments to combat the AG’s claims against him, including trying to downplay the importance of the yearly statements.

He claimed that banks didn’t actually rely on financial statements when considering whether to lend him money — instead placing more importance on the terms of the deal or the location of the property he was securing financing for.

“They were not really documents that the banks paid much attention to,” he testified.

Trump testified for roughly three-and-a-half hours Monday.

“I’ve been dealing with banks for 50 years. I probably know banks as well as anybody,” he added. “They look at the deal, they look at the location … they don’t want to get involved in financial statements.”

And the statements actually undervalued his net worth, Trump testified, claiming that his soaring Financial District property at 40 Wall Street was worth far more than the $550 million it was valued at on a 2014 statement.

“That building, you just look at it, and you say it’s worth a lot more than $550 million,” Trump said, suggesting the prosecutor “pull up a picture” of the building.

He also claimed that he repaid all the bank loans he took out, so no one was actually “harmed” and there was no “victim.”>

<As we face so many crises globally, the legislative branch of the world’s (theoretically) most powerful country has ceased to function.

Sometimes the right wing in this country seems like a riddle wrapped in an enigma encased in a conundrum. Do they want to strengthen the government in line with the once-fringe doctrine of the “unitary executive,” concentrating most official power in the hands of a president who would then rule more or less by fiat? That’s the fascist position.

Or would they prefer to destroy the government, to “starve the beast,” something anti-tax activist Grover Norquist used to call for decades ago? “I don’t want to abolish government,” he declared. “I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” That’s the anti-government nihilist position.

You might not think that those two goals could coexist comfortably within a single party. And of course, you’d be right if you were talking about an ordinary American political party. But the Republicans are no longer an ordinary party. In many respects, in fact, they have become the however-fractious sole property of one Donald J. Trump. That former and quite possibly (God forbid) future president has no trouble simultaneously advocating contradictory, not to mention devastating, ideas. That’s because, for him, ideas are an entirely fungible currency that he deploys primarily to maintain the attention and adulation of his — and it is increasingly his alone — GOP “base.” And precisely because Trump has so little invested in actual policy, the right wing believes he’s a weapon they can point and shoot in whatever direction they choose.

You might also wonder why, at a moment when horror is being heaped on horror in Israel/Palestine, when wars continue unabated in Ukraine and Sudan, I find myself focusing on some distinctly in-the-weeds aspects of the American political system. Perhaps it’s partly to distract myself from all the other nightmares around us. But even if I believed (which I don’t) that the right response to the crisis in Israel/Palestine involved sending more weapons and money to Benjamin Netanyahu, Congress isn’t in a position to appropriate anything at the moment.

Just as we face so many crises globally, the legislative branch of the world’s (theoretically) most powerful country has ceased to function. Perhaps by the time you read this, Republicans in the House of Representatives will have stopped squabbling over which right-wing bigot should be speaker. Maybe they will have opted for Jim Jordan, who has accused the Biden administration of planning to replace white voters with immigrants, or perhaps someone else entirely. Remember, too, that whatever joker emerges as speaker from such a chaotic process will be second in line to the presidency, should something happen to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Fearsome Power

Recently, I’ve somehow managed to end up on a few right-wing email lists. The strangest people (Ron DeSantis, for example) are writing to ask me for money. My most recent supplicant was Stephen Miller, former senior adviser to President Trump and co-author, with Steve Bannon, of Trump’s 2017 inaugural address in which the new president inveighed darkly against the “American carnage” he saw defiling the nation’s landscape. These days, Miller is himself a president of something called the America First Legal Foundation, which bills itself as “Fighting Back against lawless executive actions and the Radical Left.”

Miller, it turns out, has written to let me know that “we are living in extremely perilous times and a truly dangerous moment for our Republic.” As it happens, I agree with him, though obviously not for the same reasons. “The federal bureaucracy has turned against the American people,” Miller’s missive continues. “It has been completely corrupted into an ideological monolith of hard-left loathing for America. The fearsome power [his emphasis] of the state is raining down on political dissidents, while violent and vile criminals are released into our communities.” The solution, of course, is to send money to America First Legal, so it can get on with the business of “Fighting Back against lawless executive actions.”.....>

<.....Miller, however, will likely be less concerned about the fearsome power of the state once it’s again in the hands of Donald Trump. Indeed, he’s part of a group of former and present Trump advisers engaged in planning for a potential presidential transition in 2025. These include Russell Vought, who ran Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, and former Trump White House chief of personnel John McEntee. As the New York Times reported in July,

“Mr. Vought and Mr. McEntee are involved in Project 2025, a $22 million presidential transition operation that is preparing policies, personnel lists and transition plans to recommend to any Republican who may win the 2024 election. The transition project, the scale of which is unprecedented in conservative politics, is led by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has shaped the personnel and policies of Republican administrations since the Reagan presidency.”

The key thrust of Project 2025 is full implementation of the “unitary executive” principle — the view that the Constitution locates the power of the executive branch in a single individual, the president. In its maximalist version, according to the Times, this theory also contradicts the long-held doctrine of the separation of powers, under which three co-equal branches of government — executive, legislative, and judicial — provide checks and balances on each other. Under the unitary executive principle, presidential power simply outweighs that of either Congress or the Supreme Court. Project 2025’s backers know that Donald Trump will agree and act accordingly.

By “long-held doctrine” I mean a blueprint for democratic government that goes back to two seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political philosophers: Charles Montesquieu, who first wrote about the separation of powers, and John Locke, whose ideas about unalienable rights were enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Like Montesquieu, Locke advocated for a separation of governmental powers in which the legislative, not the executive, would be supreme. In that view, the democratically elected legislature makes a nation’s laws and — just as the name suggests — the executive exists to “execute” them.

Despite their occasional homages to Montesquieu and Locke, the Heritage Foundation and its followers have flipped that thinking upside down by insisting that the Constitution considers the executive branch superior to the other two. If that were the case, wouldn’t the executive branch be described in that document’s first article? In fact, Articles I, II, and III describe the legislative, executive, and judicial functions in that order, suggesting that if any of these is superior, it is (as Locke argued) the legislative.

Heritage, however, points to Article II, which begins: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen for the same Term, be elected, as follows…” What “follows” is a lengthy description of the very electoral process that Trump and company tried so hard to suborn on January 6, 2021.

While Trump was president, he delighted in explaining to anyone who’d listen that he had “an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” At the time, that suggestion of ultimate power was met with widespread derision.

However, were Trump to be re-elected, the folks at the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and the America First Policy Institute have plans to, as the starship Enterprise captain Jean-Luc Picard would say, make it so. As the Times reported in July, their goal is “to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.” Consider what follows a first step in exactly that direction.

A (Schedule) F in Government

Okay, now let’s truly dive into the weeds: In his final year as president, Trump issued an executive order amending the regulations governing the federal civil service. That service was instituted by law in 1871 in response to what was then seen as rampant favoritism throughout the federal government. Patronage jobs — positions granted, often to the friends and family of powerful politicians or in return for money or favors — were officially eliminated. Competitive processes designed to select qualified candidates for specific positions replaced the old system....>

<.....Today, the Office of Personnel Management oversees the hiring and firing of roughly 2.2 million civilian federal employees, the people who keep the wheels of government turning. They administer Social Security, Medicare, and the Internal Revenue Service, among many other things. They make sure that your meat isn’t rotten and the alcohol content of your vodka bottle is what it says on the label.

The vast majority of those employees are chosen through competitive examinations, but about 4,000 key positions are directly appointed by the president or other senior officials, including the leadership of many agencies, like the Environmental Protection Agency or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and other government executives. It’s not unreasonable for presidents to want to put their own policy stamp on various branches of government through such appointments.

Those 4,000 positions exempted from competitive hiring fall into five categories, delineated in five “schedules” (lists) described in a subsection of Title 5 of the United States Code. To be exact, Rule VI of Subsection A of Title 5 — I told you we were going to get into the weeds! — lists in Schedules A through E the employees exempt from civil service exams.

Or at least those were all the exempt categories until October 2020. That’s when Donald Trump issued an executive order creating Schedule F, which exempted from competitive hiring all “career positions in the Federal service of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character.”

Such a broad, ill-defined category could, in fact, have come to include any junior employee in any federal department who might in the course of his or her employment have cause to send a memo to a superior advocating any action. It’s estimated that implementing Schedule F would have sent the number of exempt civil service employees soaring from 4,000 to roughly 50,000.

On taking office, however, President Joe Biden immediately rescinded that executive order so, at the moment at least, Schedule F no longer exists.

In fact, the feckless President Trump we knew wasn’t even vaguely prepared to replace 50,000 civil servants with his own people during his last few months in office or, likely as not, over the following four years had he been re-elected. That’s where the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 comes in. They are now spending millions of dollars to recruit and vet political appointees who would toe the Trump line (a line they hope to draw in a future Trump presidency).

Jokers to the Right of Me…

The rock band Stealers Wheel caught our current situation perfectly back in 1972 when they sang about “Clowns to the left of me/Jokers to the right.” The jokers to the right of me (and to the right of the majority of the people in this country) are the members of the House Freedom Caucus, their allies, and other MAGA followers. They are the ones (de)constructing the house of cards that Congress is becoming at this very moment. To call them anarchists would be an insult to conscientious anarchists everywhere. They are, in fact, anti-government nihilists who believe in little beyond a kind of gun-slinging performative violence. They don’t want to drown the government quietly in a bathtub but to strangle it on live TV. And keep in mind that they have imagined nothing with which to replace it....>

<.....Where to begin? Those Freedom Caucusers in the House are now walking weapons in search of a target. Yes, they threatened to shut down the government unless their demands were met, but then they couldn’t even decide what those demands were. Did they want to cut Social Security, Medicare, and other social service programs? Impeach President Biden? Stop the prosecutions of Donald Trump? Increase border security? Stop funding Ukraine’s war effort?

When House Speaker Kevin McCarthy agreed to cooperate with the Democrats to prevent just such a shutdown, they threw him out. Then they couldn’t agree on a new speaker, even though the House of Representatives can’t conduct business without one. Yet not a day passes without a bomb-thrower like Matt Gaetz strutting around saying things like:

“My goal is to get the most conservative Speaker of the House with broad trust across the conference. The Swamp of Washington D.C. is going crazy right now because they are not in complete and total control — this gives us a great opportunity to put the interests of our fellow Americans first.”

All Together Now

Much of this would be funny if it weren’t so deadly serious. However, recent polls suggest that a 2024 contest between Donald Trump and Joe Biden remains a toss-up. As historian Heather Cox Richardson recently told the Guardian, “Democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint.” The re-election of Trump. she believes, will signal

“an end of American democracy. I have absolutely no doubt about that, and he’s made it very clear. You look at Project 2025, which is a thousand pages on how you dismantle the federal government that has protected civil rights, provided a basic social safety net, regulated business, and promoted infrastructure since 1933. The theme of his 2024 campaign is retribution.

“I don’t think people understand now that, if Donald Trump wins again, what we’re going to put in power is those people who want to burn it all down.”

I can’t say it any better than she has. They want to burn it all down so that they can rule over the smoldering ashes. That would put us on a true Schedule F — for Failed State — a condition this country now seems hellbent on achieving.>

<Former President Donald Trump’s general election polling strength is a mirage, and Republicans will be making a grave mistake if they fall for the illusion and nominate him for 2024.

The New York Times/Siena College poll between Trump and President Joe Biden is making waves, as it shows Trump leading in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. Biden is unpopular, people think the country is on the wrong track, and a majority rate the current economic conditions as “poor.” None of this is a surprise.

But to assume that this proves there are no electability concerns for Trump is a mistake. These polls are essentially just a reflection of Biden’s disapproval rating (59%) and unfavorability rating (57%). Biden is the focus because he is the president. The people currently being polled are expressing their dissatisfaction with Biden, not that they actually want Trump back.

We know this because Trump still polls very poorly individually as well. His unfavorability rating (56%) is nearly identical to Biden’s. Among undecided and persuadable voters, 46% think Trump winning would be bad for the country, while just 20% think it would be good. A majority, 54%, say that Trump has committed serious federal crimes. Just as Biden is polling below a “generic Republican,” Trump is polling below a “generic Democrat.”

In other words, voters hate both candidates. Biden is the focus now, but if Trump were to clinch the nomination, then the entire Democratic Party, liberal media, higher education, and celebrity alliance would bear down on him again. Democrats will hide Biden in a basement, and Trump will chase the cameras and remind everyone why they cast him out in 2020. It will be, as Yogi Berra said, “deja vu all over again.”

It isn’t just 2020 that would be getting a replay, either. We can see the exact phenomenon of the incumbent president polling poorly as the focus back in fall 2011, when Democrats were raising alarm bell after alarm bell that then-incumbent President Barack Obama was on track to lose. Obama, of course, went on to win in 2012.

Look at the context of 2011 and 2023, and you see just how vulnerable Trump is. Obama sat at 44% approval, which means he was more popular than Biden is now, but Trump’s unique unpopularity dwarfs that of the 2012 GOP field as well. In 2011, Democrats were coming off historic midterm losses. Meanwhile, it was Republicans in 2022 who struggled, despite Biden’s unpopularity, because the midterm elections were tied to Trump instead.

All signs continue to point to Trump being weak in the general election once you look past the fall 2023 poll that is being put in front of your face. That poll is a mirage, and it will leave Republicans stranded in the desert for another four years as Democrats laugh at just how gullible the GOP could be to think that the mirage is real.>

<Republican state senators in Oregon who boycotted the Legislature for a record six weeks earlier this year have filed a federal lawsuit as part of their efforts to seek reelection despite a recent voter-approved measure aimed at preventing walkouts.

The senators are challenging an amendment to the state constitution approved by voters last year that bars lawmakers from reelection if they have 10 or more unexcused absences. The measure passed by a wide margin following GOP walkouts in the Legislature in 2019, 2020 and 2021. But confusion over its wording has sparked a debate over what the consequences of this year's walkout would be for boycotting senators.

Three Republican state senators, along with three county Republican central committees and two voters, filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court of Oregon on Monday. In the complaint, Sens. Dennis Linthicum, Brian Boquist and Cedric Hayden — who all racked up more than 10 unexcused absences during this year's walkout — argue that expressing their political views through protest is protected under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and shouldn't disqualify them from reelection.

In the complaint, the lawmakers described walkouts as a tool the minority party could use to protest against the policies of Democrats, who hold majorities in both chambers of the Legislature.

The lawmakers also allege the measure violates their 14th Amendment right to due process.

This year’s GOP walkout sought to block Democratic legislation on abortion, transgender health care and guns. It prevented the state Senate from reaching the two-thirds quorum it needed to conduct business and held up hundreds of bills for six weeks.

The defendants named in the lawsuit are Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade and Democratic Senate President Rob Wagner. Wagner declined to comment on the suit, and Griffin-Valade’s office didn’t immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

Several Oregon state senators with at least 10 absences have already filed candidacy papers with election authorities, even though Griffin-Valade announced in August that they were disqualified from running for legislative seats in the 2024 election.

Under Measure 113, lawmakers with more than 10 unexcused absences are supposed to be disqualified from being reelected for the following term. But some Republicans have raised questions over the measure’s vague wording.

The constitutional amendment says a lawmaker is not allowed to run “for the term following the election after the member’s current term is completed.” Since a senator’s term ends in January and elections are held in November, Republican state senators argue the penalty doesn’t take effect immediately, but instead after they’ve served another term.

The federal lawsuit comes on top of a state lawsuit filed by Republican state senators that is set to be heard by the Oregon Supreme Court next month.>

<The Department of Homeland Security partnered with Stanford University and other colleges to create a 'disinformation group' to censor speech leading up to the 2020 election, new emails reveal.

The Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) was created in July 2020, and consisted of members from the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, according to a new report from the House Judiciary Committee and released Monday evening.

'[T]he federal government and universities pressured social media companies to censor true information, jokes, and political opinions,' the report said of the partnership.

Emails and internal communications obtained by the House Judiciary Committee show how the group worked to flag, censor and remove speech online.

'I know the Council has a number of efforts on broad policy around the elections, but we just set up an election integrity partnership at the request of DHS/CISA and are in weekly comms to debrief about disinfo,' the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab's senior director Graham Brookie wrote in an email.

The report said the partnership's effort was directed at Republicans and conservatives by labeling information they posted as 'misinformation,' while information posted by Democrats and liberals was largely untouched.

They alleged the partnership was used to 'censor Americans engaged in core political speech in the lead up to the 2020 election.'

'The pseudoscience of disinformation is now – and has always been – nothing more than a political ruse most frequently targeted at communities and individuals holding views contrary to the prevailing narratives,' the report said.

Emails in the report showed DHS Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Brian Scully told members of the Office of the Colorado Secretary of State that he had flagged parody accounts to Twitter.

Other emails show Scully communicated with Facebook to remove a post about the election that had been deemed misinformation.

The committee said candidates such as President Donald Trump and North Carolina Republican Senator Thom Tillis, entities such as Newsmax and the Babylon Bee, and conservative commentators such as Sean Hannity, Mollie Hemingway and Charlie Kirk were targeted by the group.

In September, federal appeals found that the Biden administration 'likely violated the First Amendment' by pressuring social media companies to scrub posts the White House deemed false or misleading.

In that case, known as Missouri v. Biden, Scully testified that switchboarding, the practice of flagging information, was ‘CISA’s role in forwarding reporting received from election officials … to social media platforms,’ said the report.

The Judiciary Committee found emails that showed months-long discussions between CISA and social media companies including Facebook and Twitter over a proposed misinformation portal.

CISA emails included a disclaimer that 'neither has nor seeks the ability to remove what information is made available on social media platforms.'

The report also said, 'there a number of university students involved with the EIP, at least four of the students were employed by CISA during the operation of EIP, using their government email accounts to communicate with CISA officials and other “external stakeholders” involved with the EIP.'

CISA Executive Director Brandon Wales told Fox News Digital the agency 'does not and has never censored speech or facilitated censorship.'

'Every day, the men and women of CISA execute the agency’s mission of reducing risk to U.S. critical infrastructure in a way that protects Americans’ freedom of speech, civil rights, civil liberties, and privacy.'

'In response to concerns from election officials of all parties regarding foreign influence operations and disinformation that may impact the security of election infrastructure, CISA mitigates the risk of disinformation by sharing information on election literacy and election security with the public and by amplifying the trusted voices of election officials across the nation,' Wales said.>

<Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, led by Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., are calling on committee Chairman Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., to open an investigation into Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his failure to properly disclose a loan he received from a wealthy businessman.

The letter, first shared with USA TODAY, asks Comer to launch an investigation into a $267,000 loan Thomas used to purchase a luxury RV. The loan appeared to have later been forgiven.

“We request that you initiate an investigation into United States Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s apparent failure to report a loan converted into a cash gift of over $200,000 from a wealthy businessman, a huge payment which was used to purchase a luxury Prevost Marathon motor coach,” the letter reads.

Thomas received the loan, which was reported by the New York Times in August, in 1999 from Anthony Welters, a healthcare executive and close friend of the Supreme Court justice. The RV Thomas purchased with the loan was equipped with a kitchen, leather seating, a bedroom and donned an orange flame motif and a pegasus painted on the back.

Welters told the New York Times that the loan was “satisfied” but Democrats from the Senate Finance Committee said in a report that Thomas never paid any “significant portion” of it, if any. The documents reviewed by the committee found that Welters forgave either most or all of the loan to Thomas, who never reported the loan in his financial disclosures.

The Senate committee report, led by Chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said, "While additional documents pertaining to the loan agreement may exist, documents reviewed by Democratic staff suggest that Justice Thomas did not repay a significant portion of the loan principal."

Thomas' lawyer has disputed Wyden's account.

The letter describes the loan and Thomas’ failure to disclose it as “astounding,” and House Democrats point out that if the loan was forgiven, Thomas was required to report it in his tax returns and it is unclear if he did so.

“The episode also raises significant potential tax issues, given that under the Tax Code, as you know, Justice Thomas would have been required to report any debt forgiven as realized income on his personal income tax returns,” the letter says.

House Oversight Democrats also took aim at House Republicans’ impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden and allegations he financially benefited from his son, Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings. Comer has been heavily scrutinizing loans the president appeared to have made to his brother in 2017 and 2018 – both were later repaid.

In response, a spokesperson for the GOP-led committee told USA TODAY in a statement the letter is an "attempt to distract from the mounting evidence showing that Joe Biden benefited from his family selling the Biden brand around the world."

Given Republicans' focus on Biden’s loans, House Oversight Democrats said they "can only assume and trust that you will be opening an investigation into the disclosure that a sitting Supreme Court Justice received a $267,230 loan from a wealthy businessman that was never repaid and never disclosed in ethics filings,” the letter continues.

Thomas found himself in hot water earlier this year after a report from ProPublica revealed he accepted lavish gifts from Harlan Crow, a billionaire and Republican mega-donor. The report and other future findings ignited an ethics scandal in the high court and spurred a debate over whether the Supreme Court should adopt a code of ethics for greater transparency.

Senate Democrats in the upper chamber’s Judiciary Committee took a significant step in their ongoing probe into ethics reform in the Supreme Court last week, vowing to subpoena Crow and other wealthy donors who provided lavish gifts and luxury travel to justices.>

<House Speaker Mike Johnson is currently toggling between different ideas when it come to how he will approach a looming government shutdown deadline.

Whatever strategy he ultimately picks will have significant implications on the chances of a shutdown actually happening in just 11 days.

The approaches that Johnson has under consideration include a "clean" government funding bill that would be all but guaranteed to sail to President Biden’s desk. But his other ideas — pairing a funding bill with immigration measures or a novel "laddered" bill — would likely be blocked by Democrats and make a shutdown much more likely.

Johnson is set to solicit input in a closed-door House GOP meeting Tuesday where Republicans are expected to hash out their plans.

Johnson been [sic] circumspect so far but has acknowledged that some type of short-term solution will be needed as Congress works through its larger appropriations process.

"We are running out of time [and] may not get this done by November 17," he said in a press conference last week.

Here’s how the various temporary approaches could play out as Washington grapples with yet another wave of debt brinkmanship.

A ‘clean CR’ to push the problem to 2024

Clearly the path of least resistance would be a simple funding bill to push the coming Nov. 17 deadline into next year without any strings attached.

Johnson has personally signaled an openness to this approach and even campaigned on it during his run for speaker. His office distributed a document at the time that laid out a plan for a short-term measure to keep the government operating into 2024 without outlining any policy demands he wanted in return.

"I would propose a measure that expires on January 15 or April 15," he wrote in his letter to colleagues. Last week, he reiterated that plan and zeroed in on Jan. 15 as a likely deadline as his "initial idea [to] get us beyond the Christmas rush."

The question is whether Johnson will push hard for this bipartisan approach or whether hard right Republicans will try to block him.

It’s worth noting what happened to then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy after he pushed through a government funding bill with Democratic support in September. He was promptly ousted by far-right Republicans over that decision and other issues.

It's less likely that House Republicans would attempt a repeat for Johnson, at least immediately.

Two approaches demanding concessions — and guaranteed Democratic opposition

Two other approaches on the table for Johnson would keep the government open but only in return for Republican priorities that Democrats would almost surely reject....>

<.....One approach being discussed would try to pair government funding with GOP wins on the issue of immigration. H.R. 2 is a far-reaching GOP immigration bill that would do things like reinstate the controversial Trump-era "Remain in Mexico" policies. It’s a bill that some in Johnson's caucus want to attach as a condition of keeping the government open through the holidays.

But H.R. 2 has already been ruled out by the Democratic-controlled Senate. Immigration is currently the topic of bipartisan Senate negotiations, with even some Republicans involved in that effort likely to reject the idea of simply accepting a House bill while they are in the middle of a search for bipartisan compromise.

Johnson could also demand other policy concessions — such as cutting federal spending in return for a two-month stopgap — but that likewise is almost certain to be rejected by Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in the Senate.

A third possible approach is something called a "laddered CR" that was first reportedly floated by Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD.). The idea there is extending government funding for different agencies for different periods of time.

How exactly this ladder would work remains unclear but such a plan would seem to allow lawmakers to favor certain parts of a government over others — perhaps giving the Pentagon a higher rung and freeing enlistees from shutdown worries while keeping the threat of shutdown front and center for other areas of government.

Johnson told reporters at a press conference last week he was considering the approach but he hasn’t committed.

“I’ll unpack for you what that means here in the coming days,” Johnson said at the time.

Either way, it’s another approach almost certain to be rejected out of hand by Democrats.

What both sides seem to agree on is that the main attraction — when it comes to government funding fights at least — awaits in the new year. That's when lawmakers aim to complete the larger appropriations process that would keep the government open for the entire fiscal year — or perhaps plunge it into an extended shutdown.

It remains to be see how Johnson — who has been in the speakers chair less than two weeks — will approach the coming fights when it gets down to details. But he has promised he's ready for battle at some point.

"We are here to change the environment, to change the paradigm, the way Washington thinks," Johnson said recently.>

<Special counsel Jack Smith and his team of prosecutors on Monday in a lengthy filing spelled out exactly why they feel former President Donald Trump should bear the full weight of justice in his Washington, D.C. election subversion case. Smith's indictment charges that Trump spearheaded efforts to orchestrate falsehoods about systemic voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

“The defendant attempts to rewrite the indictment, claiming that it charges him with wholly innocuous, perhaps even admirable conduct — sharing his opinions about election fraud and seeking election integrity,” wrote assistant special counsel James Pearce in the filing, “when in fact it clearly describes the defendant’s fraudulent use of knowingly false statements as weapons in furtherance of his criminal plans.”

“[T]he defendant stands alone in American history for his alleged crimes,” Pearce wrote. “No other president has engaged in conspiracy and obstruction to overturn valid election results and illegitimately retain power.”

Politico reported that Smith has also signaled that he plans to introduce new and potentially damning evidence at Trump's trial, which will be overseen by U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan and scheduled to begin on March 4, 2024.

Smith's latest filing came in response to Trump's own efforts to have the entire Jan. 6 case dismissed. In a series of dismissal motions, Trump and his legal team contended that the case violated Trump's First Amendment rights by criminalizing his "political speech and advocacy," claiming that Smith's indictment "does not explain" how the ex-president committed the alleged crimes he has been charged with.

Prosecutors in their rebuttal countered: “The First Amendment does not protect fraudulent speech or speech otherwise integral to criminal conduct, particularly crimes that attack the integrity and proper function of government processes."

“The defendant’s comments about the virtues of the First Amendment, over which there is no dispute, do nothing to unsettle this line of unbroken precedent," Peace wrote.

“Because the Government has not charged President Trump with responsibility for the actions at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, allegations related to these actions are not relevant and are prejudicial and inflammatory. Therefore, the Court should strike these allegations from the Indictment,” wrote Trump attorneys Todd Blanche, John Lauro, Emil Bove and Gregory Singer.

“The indictment must be dismissed because it seeks to criminalize core political speech and advocacy that lies at the heart of the First Amendment,” the filing states.

“Virtually every American, including the cited public officials, had similar access to much of this same information, including a mountain of publicly reported facts and opinions, which were the subject of wall-to-wall media coverage throughout the post-election period and beyond,” the MAGA lawyers added.

“To assert that President Trump, as one voice among countless millions, was somehow capable of unilaterally ‘tricking’ or ‘deceiving’ these individuals, who include some of the most informed politicians on the planet, simply by advocating his opinions on this contentious issue, is beyond absurd.”

Trump has maintained that his pressuring state and local officials to discredit President Joe Biden's victory was a form of "advocacy," as he claims he truly thought the election had been stolen from him. Smith and prosecutors have vehemently refuted this claim, however, with Pearce writing in the filing that "Knowing lies are neither opinions nor ‘pure advocacy,’ and in any event, the defendant could not use so-called advocacy as a cover for his scheme to obstruct a governmental function through deceit."

"Were it otherwise, defendants captured en route to a bank robbery could not be charged with conspiracy because their crime did not succeed.”

Pearce also cited a list of historical elections referenced by Trump's legal team in their own filings, as Politico noted. These elections, which included those from 1800 and 1960, saw controversies surrounding slates of electors at their core.

<Look, Donald Trump wouldn’t resort to the name-calling, the prickly attacks on judges and prosecutors, the self-defeating effort to appeal to his base even when it hurts him in court if – and I can’t emphasize this enough – he weren’t losing.

It’s a losing man’s bet to gamble that instead of winning in court you’re going to win at the polls on Election Day and make this all go away.

It’s a loser’s play to chide, ridicule, and threaten the judge who is hearing the big fraud case against you.

It’s a desperate man’s Hail Mary to ignore the overwhelming evidence against you and play to the cameras and friendly audiences. You step back and look at the Trump arc since 2017 and I’m only being partly glib when I offer this summation of the Trump message to the base: “I’m a loser just like you.”

The losses keep piling up: election defeats in midterms and in 2020, multiple indictments, his foundation dissolved, and his business empire facing massive fraud findings. Other than a couple of Senate impeachment acquittals, it’s a loser’s string of defeats.

It all played out in open court yesterday in the civil fraud trial in New York. And yet … the media fascination with Trump’s bombast, with the pissing matches he sets up and then participates in, and with his transgressive behavior sidesteps what a loser he is. It’s similar to the hackneyed tendency to ascribe to Trump 3D chess skills and brilliant maneuvering that mere mortals simply can’t fathom.

I often wonder what it will take. Trump in a prison uniform and fulminating behind bars? I somehow doubt even that will break the spell.>