<Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R) announced Monday that she has signed a bill into law punishing employers that make it easier for their employees to bargain collectively.

The law, known as Senate Bill 231, bars companies from receiving state economic incentives if they voluntarily recognize their workers’ unions, rather than forcing them to vote on whether to unionize in secret-ballot elections. Affected companies could lose grants, loans and tax credits starting next year.

Speaking to a local chamber of commerce event in Huntsville on Monday, Ivey said the anti-union law would “protect our Alabama jobs.” She also referenced a high-profile union election at a Mercedes-Benz facility near Tuscaloosa this week, in which thousands of employees will decide on whether to join the United Auto Workers union.

“Alabama is not Michigan. Huntsville, Tuscaloosa — they’re not Detroit,” Ivey said, according to a transcript provided by her office. “We want to ensure that Alabama values, not Detroit values, continue to define the future of this great state.”

Companies could start losing economic incentives starting next year under the law. When a majority of employees in a workplace have signed union cards, the employer can choose to voluntarily recognize the union, a process sometimes called “card check.” Once it’s clear enough employees have signed, the union becomes official automatically. This allows union leaders to avoid an election campaign, during which employers often try to pressure their workers — by means legal and illegal — to vote “no” on unionization.

Anti-union groups and many Republican lawmakers are pushing bills like the one Ivey signed, claiming unions bully workers into signing cards. Tennessee implemented a similar law last year, and Georgia followed suit earlier this year. Meanwhile, the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council has been shopping the legislation around GOP-led states, the Associated Press recently reported.

After Georgia approved its bill, Liz Shuler, the president of the AFL-CIO labor federation, called the legislation “appalling,” and said it undermines the “fundamental freedoms” of both workers and employers.

Labor groups could mount legal challenges to the laws on the grounds that they conflict with the National Labor Relations Act, the federal law covering collective bargaining in the private sector. Benjamin Sachs, a labor law professor at Harvard Law School, recently told HuffPost that he believed state laws like Alabama’s will probably be overridden by the federal law.

“The basic idea of labor preemption is states can’t do stuff like this,” he said.

Southern states tend to have some of the lowest rates of union membership in the country — though Alabama’s is the highest in the region, at 7.5%, compared to a national rate of 10%. The UAW is hoping to make more inroads in the South following its landmark win last month at the Volkswagen assembly plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where workers voted nearly 3-to-1 in favor of unionizing.

That victory came in spite of the best efforts of Ivey and Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, who co-signed a letter with other Republican governors urging workers to vote against the union.

Mercedes-Benz workers in Alabama finish voting in their election on Friday.>

<A federal appeals court sided with a transgender deputy who was denied equal medical care when the Houston County, Georgia Sheriff’s Office refused to cover her gender-affirming care under their health insurance. This comes after the county spent $1.2 dollars in legal fees to avoid paying for the deputy’s $10,000 surgery.

Represented by the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund (TLDEF), Sgt. Anna Lange began her lawsuit back in 2019 after her employer denied her gender-affirming care, despite having worked for the Sheriff’s Office since 2006.

“Today’s victory is a win not just for me, but for all transgender Southerners who deserve equal access to life-saving transition-related care,” said Lange in a TLDEF press release. “I have proudly served my community for decades and it has been deeply painful to have the county fight tooth and nail, redirecting valuable resources toward denying me basic health care — health care that the courts and a jury of my peers have already agreed I deserve. I’m pleased to see that yet another court has deemed those efforts to be unfair and illegal.”

In 2022, a federal judge of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia ruled that Lange had been discriminated against, citing the Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County as legal precedent.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit just ruled 2-1 in her favor. The judges also cited Bostock v. Clayton County in defending Lange.

“Today’s historic victory is the first decision by a federal appellate court affirming that it is unlawful for an employer to discriminate against transgender people in an employee health plan. It is immediately binding on employers in Georgia, Florida, and Alabama,” said TLDEF in their press release.

“Because transgender persons are the only (insurance) plan participants who qualify for gender-affirming surgery, the (county’s) plan denies health care coverage based on transgender status,” said the court in its decision.

“Houston County deprived Lange of a benefit or privilege of her employment by reason of her nonconforming traits, thereby unlawfully punishing her for her gender nonconformity.”

In his dissent, Judge Andrew Brasher wrote, “On the face of this policy, it doesn’t treat anyone differently based on sex, gender nonconformity, or transgender status. Assuming Lange is factually correct that only transgender people would want sex change surgery, that doesn’t mean the plan discriminates because of sex.”

TLDEF Co-Interim Legal Director Gabriel Arkles said in their press release, “Houston County and Sheriff (Cullen) Talton have once again lost in court, after spending some $2 million on lawyers to try to deprive Sergeant Lange of medically necessary care that costs orders of magnitude less solely to discriminate against transgender people.”>

<As Mother’s Day approached, a group of Republican senators, led by Alabama’s Katie Britt, tried to rally some support for a new legislative proposal called the “More Opportunities for Moms to Succeed Act” (or “MOMS Act”). As Axios reported late last week, the bill seemed rather predictable.

This is, to be sure, standard GOP fare. Republican officials tend to be uncomfortable with the idea that the party’s sole focus in this area is imposing abortion restrictions, and the MOMS Act appears designed to package familiar GOP measures on the issue.

The fact that these senators intend to extend grants to so-called “crisis pregnancy centers” is part of the conservative agenda, and a reminder of why the legislation doesn’t have — and won’t have — any Democratic support in the chamber.

But a HuffPost report noted that the Pregnancy.gov provisions in the bill are drawing additional scrutiny because they allegedly raise the prospect of “a federal database storing information on pregnant people.”

It was against this backdrop that Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington joined with 10 other Senate Democratic women to denounce Britt’s bill, saying it would, among other things, “create a new government-run website to collect data on pregnant women and direct them to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers.”

To be sure, Britt’s office has thoroughly rejected the idea that the legislation is designed to create some kind of “registry,” but the press release from the 11 Senate Democratic women added that under the Pregnancy.gov plan, the website would “encourage users to provide their contact information, ‘which the Secretary may use to conduct outreach via phone or email to follow up with users’ — meaning that pregnant women would be encouraged to provide data to a potential Trump administration and potentially allow a government bureaucrat to follow up with them about the status of their pregnancy.”

The Democratic senators added, “Americans don’t want the government to track, intimidate, and coerce pregnant women into carrying their pregnancies to term no matter their circumstances. Yet, Senate Republicans want to mandate the creation of an online federal database where women will be encouraged to register their pregnancies with the government in order to push them toward anti-abortion propaganda and dangerous crisis pregnancy centers — this tells us exactly how Republicans will weaponize the whole of government to restrict a woman’s freedom to choose and force them to stay pregnant no matter what.”

All of this comes on the heels of Donald Trump’s interview with Time magazine, in which reporter Eric Cortellessa asked, “Do you think states should monitor women’s pregnancies so they can know if they’ve gotten an abortion after the ban?” The presumptive GOP nominee responded, “I think they might do that.”

Britt’s bill has 12 Republican co-sponsors. I don’t imagine we’ve heard the last of the debate over its provisions.>

Evil on the march, yet again.

<It was the challenge heard around Capitol Hill. As members of Congress prepared to leave Capitol Hill for their Thanksgiving break last fall, Republican Rep. Chip Roy delivered impassioned remarks on the House floor about his party’s legislative efforts.

“One thing. I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing — one! — that I can go campaign on and say we did,” the Texan said. “Anybody sitting in the complex, if you want to come down to the floor and come explain to me, one meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done.”

No one rushed to respond to his challenge.

More than six months later, as GOP lawmakers look for ways to maintain their majority in the House, Roy’s question remains relevant — because his party still doesn’t know what to say in defense of its recent efforts. Punchbowl News reported: Ahead of the 2022 elections, House Republicans — in the minority at the time, but optimistic about their chances — eagerly promoted what they labeled their “Commitment to America” pledge. The idea was to assure the electorate that GOP officials not only wanted to be in the majority, they also had concrete ideas about what they’d do if voters returned them to power.

A closer look made clear that the “Commitment to America” was a bit of joke [sic]. As regular readers might recall, the agenda — to the extent that one could call it that — was a one-page memo of vague principles and platitudes. A meaningful governing blueprint it was not.

But two years later, House Republicans aren’t even clearing this low bar. When Punchbowl News asked “roughly two dozen House GOP lawmakers about how they plan to convince voters to let them hold on to the majority,” they had strikingly little to say.

It’s tough to blame them. If I were a House Republican tasked with coming up with a list of accomplishments, I wouldn’t know what to say, either. We are, after all, talking about the 118th Congress — which has been credibly described by some as the worst Congress ever.

As we recently discussed, resignations have reached a generational high. Legislative progress has slowed to a pace unseen in nearly a century. Lawmakers have struggled mightily to complete basic tasks. One House speaker has already been ousted — a development without precedent in American history — and another only survived after Democrats came to his rescue.

Referring to the GOP-led House, a recent Punchbowl News report concluded, “This is the most chaotic, inefficient and ineffective majority we’ve seen in decades covering Congress.”

Americans have seen a needlessly shambolic process to elect a House speaker, a wildly unnecessary impeachment inquiry against a sitting president, an equally unnecessary impeachment of a sitting cabinet secretary, the expulsion of a disgraced member, and several pointless censures.

Is it any wonder why GOP members are struggling to defend their record?

In fairness, Republicans could plausibly argue that with a Democratic-led Senate and a Democratic White House, the prospect for legislative breakthroughs were severely limited. That’s true. But it’s also true that GOP House members could’ve engaged in good-faith negotiations, embraced legislative compromises, and racked up some victories they could take to voters in the fall.

They didn’t want to. The result is a wasted governing opportunity and a blank slate where a record is supposed to be.>

<Donald Trump showed weakness in the suburbs in Tuesday’s primaries, while Joe Biden’s problem with the protest vote appeared to fade.

David Trone collapsed in Maryland’s Senate race, despite his heavy spending. Meanwhile, incumbents there and in Nebraska and West Virginia all prevailed.

The big winners on Tuesday included the Democratic establishment in Maryland, which propelled Angela Alsobrooks to victory over Trone; the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which notched a victory in a Democratic House primary; and House incumbents, who still haven’t lost to a challenger so far this primary season.

A week after Nikki Haley earned 22 percent of the vote in Indiana’s open GOP primary, the widespread expectation was that different rules in the states voting on Tuesday would take a huge chunk out of support for her zombie presidential candidacy.

That didn’t exactly happen. Even though Haley likely won’t end up matching her Indiana total in Maryland, Nebraska or West Virginia, there are still some warning signs for Trump in the results.

Unlike Indiana, where voters can pick any primary ballot they’d like, the GOP primary was open only to registered Republicans in Maryland and Nebraska, and registered Republicans and independents in West Virginia.

Despite its semi-open primary, West Virginia was the Trumpiest of the three states: The former president captured 88 percent of the vote there. But there were significant pockets of Trump resistance among Republicans in Maryland and Nebraska.

It wasn’t shocking to see Haley break 30 percent in the affluent D.C. suburbs of Montgomery County, Maryland. Trump has been weakest in the suburbs throughout the primary process, and Montgomery County towns like Bethesda and Takoma Park represent the beating heart of the Trump resistance.

But it’s more concerning for Trump that she’s at 23 percent in Douglas County, Nebraska, the population center for that state’s 2nd Congressional District. Now-President Biden won the Omaha district’s electoral vote in 2020 thanks to GOP defectors, and Tuesday’s primary showed they’re still not on board with Trump.

The Democratic establishment strikes back
It’s hard to overstate the extent of Trone’s failure on Tuesday. Yes, there’s the $62 million in self-funding — the second-most of any Senate candidate in history, behind only Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who actually won his race.

But there’s also this: Trone began his blitz of TV ads on May 9. Of 2023. A full year to build momentum and capture the Democratic nomination, and it all washed out over the past two months, when the state party establishment coalesced behind Alsobrooks. One of her final TV spots featured a mass of Democratic elected officials supporting her, from Gov. Wes Moore and Sen. Chris Van Hollen to former House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer.

The message was clear — the party apparatus was in Alsobrooks’ corner — and Democratic voters responded to it. Those same cues will likely be needed again in the fall to remind voters of the stakes in the general election.

Despite early polls showing Hogan ahead, Maryland is one of the bluest states in the nation, and the argument that it’s more important to elect a Democrat to maintain Senate control than vote for a popular former Republican governor could be an effective one. But it will take money to do it, and that will likely have to come from national Democrats now that Trone’s checkbook is closed — money they would rather spend defending the chamber’s most likely majority-making seats in Montana and Ohio.

It’s been a paradox for Democrats fretting about Biden’s standing in the polls: Republicans are more likely to say they’ll vote for Trump in general-election polling than Democrats are for Biden, but there are more protest votes in the primaries against Trump.

That continued Tuesday in Maryland and Nebraska, where Biden outran Trump significantly by percentage. In Nebraska, Biden was breaking 90 percent of the vote against Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), even as Trump was stuck in the low 80s against Haley. And in Maryland, the “uncommitted” ballot line was poised to earn about 10 percent of the vote, with the greatest concentrations in the Republican counties of far Western Maryland....>

<....The exception was West Virginia, which had also delivered a surprising rebuke to the last Democratic president up for reelection. Then-President Barack Obama was famously held under 60 percent in West Virginia’s 2012 primary against ex-con Keith Judd. On Tuesday, Biden was running barely over 70 percent, with Jason Palmer, the surprising winner of the March caucuses in American Samoa, drawing more than 10 percent of the vote.

A protest vote in ruby-red West Virginia didn’t doom Obama in 2012, and it’s not likely an additional sign of trouble for Biden, who has plenty of headaches already. He can take some solace in the protest vote appearing to fade in Maryland and Nebraska.

Outside spending groups had a good night. Self-funders, not so much.

United Democracy Project, the super PAC arm of AIPAC, scored a major win with Democratic state Sen. Sarah Elfreth’s victory in the crowded race to succeed retiring Rep. John Sarbanes in Maryland’s deep-blue 3rd District. The group put in more than $4 million — one of its biggest investments to date. That heavy spending played a role in her success over Harry Dunn, a former Capitol Police officer who gained national prominence for his testimony in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 riot. Dunn far outraised and outspent her directly, but the AIPAC money helped narrow the spending gap.

The anti-tax Club for Growth also secured a victory in the GOP primary for governor of West Virginia. After the group and its affiliated super PAC poured more than $13 million into the race, Club-backed Attorney General Patrick Morrisey emerged from the contentious and expensive primary. (The group didn’t have as much luck in the Republican primary for West Virginia Senate, where its endorsed candidate, Rep. Alex Mooney, lost to Gov. Jim Justice.)

Self-funding candidates fared worse. In addition to Trone’s defeat, businessperson Chris Miller, the son of Rep. Carol Miller, loaned himself more than $5 million for his bid for West Virginia governor, helping him blanket the airwaves. He was the top spender on advertisements, placing more than $10 million, per ad tracker AdImpact. Despite all that, he ended up finishing in third.

Incumbents in every congressional primary faced challengers on Tuesday night — and all of them overwhelmingly won.

Primary challengers have had a weak showing so far this cycle, with no non-incumbent challenger successfully ousting a sitting member of Congress. (Rep. Barry Moore, a Republican from Alabama, defeated fellow Rep. Jerry Carl in a rare member-on-member primary earlier this year).

Some of Tuesday’s primary attempts, like the ones in most of Maryland, were less serious, featuring underfunded and little-known candidates. But Republicans challenging Rep. Don Bacon in Nebraska and Rep. Carol Miller in West Virginia caused the incumbents and their allies to put up their guard.

Bacon’s and Miller’s challengers — businessperson Dan Frei and former state Del. Derrick Evans, respectively — ran to the right of the incumbents, the latest examples of the ideological fractures in GOP primaries. Frei and Evans both earned the endorsement of Freedom Caucus Chair Bob Good, and Frei had the support of Nebraska’s increasingly anti-establishment state Republican Party, which snubbed all of its incumbents this year.

Both challengers were considered longshots. But Frei’s candidacy was serious enough to cause Bacon’s allies to put more than $1 million on the airwaves. And Miller went negative against Evans, who served prison time for his participation in the Capitol riot, accusing him of being a Democrat.

Frei and Evans ultimately lost by wide margins, which is likely good news for Republicans in November. A potential Evans win wouldn’t have changed much for the GOP’s chances of holding the majority in the fall, given he was running in a deep-red district. But a Frei victory could have been disastrous for the Republican Party.

The Omaha-based seat went for Biden in 2020, and nominating a Republican to the right of Bacon, who touts himself as a “common-sense conservative,” would have created a bigger opening for Democratic state Sen. Tony Vargas. Still, Democrats are bullish on the seat after Vargas lost to Bacon by just three points in the midterms.>

<Democratic Congressman Jim McGovern has called Speaker of the House Mike Johnson "pathetic" on the House floor over his recent visit to the New York hush-money criminal trial of former President Donald Trump.

Johnson and a number of other prominent Republicans appeared outside the Manhattan criminal courthouse on Tuesday to denounce the proceedings against Trump, who has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records and claims to be the victim of a "witch hunt."

The speaker told members of the press on Tuesday that the "sham of a trial" was "corrupt" and designed to "keep [Trump] off of the campaign trail." McGovern addressed Johnson's visit during a House hearing on Tuesday, accusing the speaker of "acting as a prop for Donald Trump" and attempting to "rationalize" Trump's alleged crimes.

"The American people deserve better," McGovern said. "And they certainly deserve better than the speaker of the House spending his time trying to influence our justice system at a courthouse in New York City. How pathetic, when we have real problems we need to deal with."

"He's in New York trying to explain away all of Donald Trump's problems," he added. "It's pathetic. That's where the speaker of the House is spending his time—trying to rationalize all of the former president's crimes. Give me a break."

Newsweek reached out for comment to Johnson's office via email on Wednesday.

The speaker's trip to New York followed several other prominent Republicans who showed up to support the ex-president this week, including Senators Tommy Tuberville and J.D. Vance and Representatives Byron Donalds and Cory Mills.

Johnson was one of several GOP visitors who specifically spoke on topics that the former president is prohibited from speaking about during the trial due to a gag order, such as launching attacks on former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, one of the prosecution's key witnesses.

Tuberville admitted during a Newsmax TV interview on Tuesday that helping Trump to "overcome" the gag order by attacking figures protected under the gag order was one of the "reasons" that Republicans have been appearing at the courthouse.

Criticism of Johnson's appearance at the Trump trial came from both sides of the political spectrum, with a significant number of adherents to the former president's MAGA movement joining Democrats in slamming the speaker for his visit, albeit for different reasons.

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell said during a Fox News interview on Tuesday evening that Johnson's visit to Manhattan was "all performative" and "disgusting," arguing that the speaker has shown that he "has no passion for our great real country" by "reading off some notes" about "the travesties going on against our real president."

GOP Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who recently launched an unsuccessful attempt to oust Johnson from the speakership, argued on social media that the speaker should have instead been focusing on "defunding" Special Counsel Jack Smith, whose federal investigation led to one of the other three felony cases against the ex-president.>

How fitting that Tubesteak the Garrulous came through for his hero.

1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 c5 3.d5 b5 4.cxb5 a6 5.f3 g6 6.e4 d6 7.Na3 Bg7 8.Ne2 Nbd7 9.Nc3 O-O 10.Be2 Nb6 11.O-O e6 12.dxe6 fxe6 13.Bg5 a5 14.Qd2 Qd7 15.Nc4 Nxc4 16.Bxc4 Bb7 17.Na4 Rad8 18.e5 1-0>

En passant, the irony of the swipe:

<....It's called the World Open for a reason. Perf prefers Vermont where the going is a wee bit easier.>

<There is no question President Biden is wildly unpopular with voters. No poll has him anywhere close to above water in approval rating. Further, on individual issues, Biden is also viewed as out of line with what the public wants or supports.

This has all the makings of a replay of the 1980 election, in which Ronald Reagan wiped the floor with President Jimmy Carter by almost 10 points. But no poll suggests a result like that one, or anything close to it, for that matter. Why? Because even though Biden’s policies are so unpopular, Donald Trump is just as unpopular personally.

The election is still a long way off, so polling today is more of a checkpoint than anything else. And the checkpoint is not as good for Trump as you think it is. Voters hate Biden’s policies, but they hate Trump the person — not universally, of course, but to a degree that makes everything more difficult for the former president.

Were that hatred not real, Trump would be running away in the polls right now. With the exception of abortion, there isn’t much issue-wise where Biden enjoys popular support.

Biden is underwater on nearly everything. On the economy, the RealClearPolitics average has him at minus-18.6 percentage points. On foreign policy, the RCP average is minus-25.2 percentage points. On immigration and inflation it’s minus-29.4 and minus-29.5, respectively, and on the Israeli-Hamas war Biden is at a whopping minus-29.9 percentage points.

Were this any other year, or were the presumptive Republican nominee anyone else, this election would be a massacre. But it is 2024, and Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee. There’s no getting around that.

That’s why, when you look at the polling on issues, there is a massive disconnect between where the public is relative to the current president, and who they are telling pollsters they will vote for.

The RCP average for president has Trump up only 1.2 percent in the national popular vote. Trump fares better in the swing states, ranging from his 6.2 point lead in Nevada to a 0.6 percent lead in Wisconsin.

Depending on where you get your news and the political bent of the people giving it to you, you think either that Trump is winning in a walk or that Biden has no need to dig his suitcases out of storage. But the truth lies somewhere in between.

Biden is very much disliked as president. People see him as either out of touch with what they care about or just wrong on the issues. He doesn’t seem to care, declaring the polls to be uniformly wrong.

The truth is, the polls are right, and they show that Biden is unpopular and Trump is hated. There’s a difference between those two things.

The closeness of the general election polls indicate that a very slight majority, at least as of this moment, would rather vote for someone they hate than for someone they think is bad at the job or wrong on the issues.

The Trump years are viewed favorably by more people now than they were at the time, and certainly more favorably economically than the Biden years. The only variable that can’t be accounted for is Trump himself.

Trump inspires people either to love him or to hate him. You won’t find much indifference. Biden, on the other hand, might as well be an empty shoe — he almost doesn’t matter. This election will be about whether people’s dislike of Trump outweighs their preference for the results of his presidency over those of Biden’s presidency.

Trump’s diehard supporters won’t understand this any more than Trump-haters can understand how people could like him. But reality is not dependent upon any of us accepting it.

If Trump can figure out a way to less “Trumpy,” even just a little bit less, a little more often, he will increase his odds of winning significantly. If not, things could well slide in the other direction.

It’s an odd campaign objective — to make someone less hated or annoying — but Trump wins by quite a bit on nearly every issue. He himself is the main obstacle to a lot of people voting for him. No amount of dislike for Biden is going to change that, because with Trump — and uniquely with Trump — people separate the man from the results.

Many seem willing to forgo what they see as better policy to oppose someone they don’t like personally. Biden is an afterthought — a non-entity who, even if he wins reelection, can lay no real claim to a mandate for anything except not being Trump.

I hope that people put aside their feelings about Trump. I’m with him, and as far as the issues go, so are the American people. But this election may not be about issues at all. If it becomes an election about personality, then that’s how Donald Trump ends up losing.>

<A Minnesota bishop has threatened to sue a Catholic magazine this week over an article that connected him to former President Donald Trump.

In April, Commonweal magazine published an article by Massimo Faggioli, a theology and religious studies professor at Villanova University, titled "Will Trumpism Spare Catholicism?"

The article warns of Trump's connection to the Catholic Church and Catholics' support of the former president ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Last month, a poll from the Pew Research Center found that 55 percent of Catholic voters leaned toward Trump, while 43 percent leaned toward President Joe Biden. Some Catholics have been critical of Biden's stance on abortion issues, and the poll found that the president received more support than Trump among those considered religiously unaffiliated.

"Just over six months out from the 2024 presidential election, it could be said that a 'Trump-Strickland' axis may be coming into existence. The 'Strickland' (as in Joseph Strickland, deposed bishop of Tyler, Texas) might stand for those quarters of U.S. Catholicism drawn to performances like last month's Mar-a-Lago prayer event at the former president's residence, where Trump was presented as 'the only Catholic option' for voters," Faggioli wrote in the Commonweal article.

The article went on to mention Minnesota Bishop Robert Barron and his Word on Fire ministry, saying they were connected to Trump and his presidential campaign. However, that section of the article was removed after Barron threatened legal action.

"Editors' note: With the author's permission, the editors have removed a paragraph that originally appeared here because Bishop Robert Barron's media ministry, Word on Fire, informed us that they consider it slander for them to be in any way associated with Donald Trump or Trumpism," the updated Commonweal article said.

Speaking to Newsweek, the Word on Fire ministry said the exact phrase it provided to Commonweal in response to the article was this: "Word on Fire is a non-partisan, non-profit, Catholic apostolate dedicated to presenting and promoting the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Catholic Faith."

"As a 501(c)3 organization, Word on Fire Catholic Ministries does not endorse or condemn any political candidates or political parties," the organization said.

Newsweek has contacted Commonweal magazine for comment via email.

Wednesday, the National Catholic Register obtained a letter the Word on Fire ministry sent to Commonweal. The ministry criticized the editors' note and said the letter should be considered a "formal notice to preserve all records in anticipation of litigation," the outlet reported.

"The Editor's note, with the author's permission, clearly was published with not only a reckless disregard for the truth and the publisher knowing that the statement was false but with what is clearly actual malice for WOF and its leadership," the letter said, according to the National Catholic Register.

In the letter, Word on Fire warned of litigation for any accusations that it was connected to politics, the outlet reported.

On May 13, Larry Chapp, a former theology professor at DeSales University, penned an article in The Catholic World Report defending Barron. He said the Commonweal article was a "smear since there is not a shred of evidence that this is even remotely true."

"Does Bishop Barron speak out on the so-called 'culture wars'? Does he oppose woke cancel culture? Does he see something inchoately interesting and potentially important in the idiosyncratic weirdness and intensity of Jordan Peterson? Has he been somewhat critical—but not harshly so—of certain troubling elements in the Synod on synodality?" Chapp wrote. "The answer is 'Yes' to all of those questions—but not one of them makes someone part of a new 'Trump-Catholic axis.' I would also answer all of those questions with a 'Yes' and yet I am resolutely opposed to Trump.">

<Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), an ardent supporter of Donald Trump, tried to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) last week for allowing the approval of fresh aid for Ukraine. She failed, with Democrats joining most Republicans to defeat the motion to vacate in a lopsided 359-43 vote. Johnson said he appreciated the show of support and hoped "this is the end of the personality politics and the frivolous character assassination that has defined the 118th Congress."

Many of Greene's GOP colleagues booed her in what Newsweek described as a sign she has "lost Republicans." Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said his party's "decision to stop Marjorie Taylor Greene from plunging the House of Representatives and the country into further chaos is rooted in our commitment to solve problems for everyday Americans in a bipartisan manner." Trump, now campaigning to win back the White House, defended Johnson and warned that Greene's effort was stirring "chaos" at the wrong time, The New York Times reported. Greene has gone from the far-right fringes of the GOP caucus to a position of considerable influence as a voice of the MAGA faithful, but did she go too far this time?

Marjorie Taylor Greene's moment of influence could be over, said Jemima Kelly in the Financial Times. The Republicans who booed her were not worried it would "get them in trouble with The Big Boss," even though she is the "embodiment of the MAGA faction of the GOP." Trump may have needed her support "when he had to compete with the likes of Ron DeSantis for the right-wing base of the Republican party." But now he has locked up the nomination and "doesn't need her anymore." It looks like MTG is "too MAGA for DJT."

Greene's "public shaming was far too long in coming," said Patricia Lopez at Bloomberg. Her defiance of Johnson's peace offerings in private meetings "united a fractious GOP caucus" behind the speaker. Trump has obviously been "losing patience with Greene." She was "booted from the House Freedom Caucus last year for attacking fellow Republicans," and has "alienated" so many colleagues by showing "disregard for preserving a slim GOP majority in the House" that she appears to be a "spent force at this point." Her humiliating defeat "should remind House Republicans that they can unify and put down agitators within their ranks when needed."

Johnson's triumph gives the GOP a golden opportunity to start cleaning up its act, but don't hold your breath, said Alex Shephard in The New Republic. "Unfortunately, Marjorie Taylor Greene isn't going anywhere," because she still has Trump's support. Yes, he opposed the effort to take down Johnson. But he is "not really trying to chasten Greene, let alone excommunicate her." He merely wants her to dial back the "intraparty dysfunction" while he tries to win over moderates he needs to take back the White House from President Joe Biden. "Once the election ends, Trump has little reason to play nice with his fellow Republicans," and he'll go back to rewarding bomb-throwers like Greene for their "blind loyalty."

The liberal media will keep MTG relevant in the meantime, said Debra Saunders in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. She "made her bones trashing other Republicans," and as long as she keeps it up CNN will keep airing everything she says. Greene immediately showed she has no plans to give up the "shameless stunts" she uses to stick it to the establishment, spinning Johnson's survival as a victory for the "uni-party," as if any bipartisan vote is proof that mainstream Republicans are in cahoots with Democrats. The media loves to play up that kind of vitriol from the far right. "So even though Greene failed bigly, expect to see her nightly on the news channels as she shares her views on the Capitol steps with press scrums hanging on her every word. MTG is, after all, the gift that keeps on giving.">

<Said a great congregational preacher To a hen, "You're a beautiful creature."
And the hen, just for that,
Laid an egg in his hat,
And thus did the Hen reward Beecher.

— Oliver Herford

The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher
Called the hen a most elegant creature.
The hen, pleased with that,
Laid an egg in his hat,
And thus did the hen reward Beecher.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher
Said of hens: "some are elegant creatures".
Of the hens pleased with that,
Some laid eggs in his lap.
What will judgement day hatch for the preacher?

<It’s that time of year when the life-tenured denizens of America’s imperial court, otherwise known as the Supreme Court, come down from their bench to mix with the masses.

Just kidding. The justices limit their appearances to friendly audiences, to elite folks too well-mannered to ask them about matters like gifts from billionaires with business before the court or misleading confirmation testimony to the Senate.

With oral arguments for this term’s cases ended in late April, the justices are now writing the decisions that will trickle out through June, including on whether to withhold gun rights from domestic abusers; limit access to mifepristone, the pill used for two-thirds of abortions; gut federal agencies’ regulatory power; and immunize Donald Trump from criminal prosecution. Amid their opinion-writing, they accept a few invitations to speak, cracking a window into their thinking as well as their gripes.

Four of the court’s six-member conservative supermajority were on the stump in recent days. Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett M. Kavanaugh spoke to groups of lawyers and judges in the congenial South. Samuel A. Alito Jr., one of the court’s six Catholics, was commencement speaker at “passionately Catholic” Franciscan University of Steubenville, in Ohio. And Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. gave a purposely anodyne address to a Washington-based judicial group.

The other three were more interesting. Kavanaugh defensively suggested that the unpopular court’s unpopular decisions — ending a half-century of abortion rights, for example — would be seen more favorably with time. Thomas whined to a sympathetic crowd about “the nastiness and lies” in the news media about himself and his would-be insurrectionist wife, Ginni; much of that coverage recently won a Pulitzer Prize for ProPublica. And Alito enjoyed a standing ovation when he was introduced as the author of the 2022 Dobbs antiabortion ruling, despite overwhelming opposition to it nationwide.

Kavanaugh spoke Friday in Austin, Texas. The city is a progressive oasis in the red state, but Kavanaugh appeared before judges, attorneys and court officials connected with the most conservative of the federal appeals courts, the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, covering Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. At a time when the Supreme Court is polling at record lows on job approval and public trust, Kavanaugh was appropriately asked during a question-and-answer session how to boost confidence in the judiciary.

He didn’t seem to see the problem. Instead Kavanaugh blithely compared the current Roberts court — which has greatly expanded rights for gun owners, police and corporations, limited those for voters, consumers and women, and eroded the wall between church and state — to the court of the 1950s and 1960s led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, whose landmark rulings desegregated public schools, expanded voting and other civil rights, ended mandatory Christian prayer in schools and established new rights for criminal defendants.....>

<.....The Warren court’s decisions were “unpopular basically from start to finish,” Kavanaugh said. And yet “a lot of them are landmarks now that we accept as parts of the fabric of America.”

He’s right about the Warren court legacy. But Kavanaugh is kidding himself if he thinks that Dobbs and other decisions that he has backed will eventually gain widespread favor. The Warren court is remembered for expanding individuals’ constitutional rights; the Roberts court, in overturning Roe, is the first to take one away. (Kavanaugh’s support for Dobbs provoked Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the decisive vote for his confirmation, to complain that he'd “misled” her during the Senate’s consideration of his nomination.)

Thomas spoke the same day at a conference of the conservative U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, covering Georgia, Florida and Alabama. His most noteworthy remarks reflected the Roberts court’s other legacy: ethical indifference. The event was held at a luxury resort on Alabama’s Gulf Coast, appropriate given Thomas’ affinity for such places, which has been well documented by ProPublica and other media. Republican donor and billionaire Harlan Crow provided Thomas with yacht trips, real estate deals and other benefits.

Also appropriately, Thomas was with his wife, Ginni, who not only shared the largesse but also is central to Thomas’ other ethical transgression. She worked behind the scenes to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election, yet Thomas has refused to recuse himself from three cases before the court dealing with Jan. 6 and Trump’s role in conniving to stay in power.

To hear Thomas tell it, the problem isn’t his conflicts of interest but the critics and we journalists who report on him. “Especially in Washington, people pride themselves in being awful,” he said.

And that’s why he and Ginni like RV-ing across the country to see “regular people.” Thomas didn’t mention that an investigation by the New York Times found that his luxury 40-foot motor home was underwritten by another rich pal.

Alito, another billionaire’s beneficiary, received an honorary degree in Christian ethics on Saturday at Franciscan University. Like Thomas, he groused about his critics; fittingly, he quoted Rodney “I don’t get no respect” Dangerfield. Alito has become known for fussing that Christian conservatives get no respect, even as he and other conservative Catholics dominate the court. Free exercise of religion is “a disfavored right,” he’s carped in the past, and “you can’t say that marriage is a union between one man and one woman.”

In that spirit, Alito warned the Franciscan grads, “When you venture out into the world, you may find yourself in a job or a community or a social setting when you will be pressured to endorse ideas you don’t believe or to abandon core beliefs. It will be up to you to stand firm.”

God knows he does. And so do Thomas and Kavanaugh. The rest of us, the masses, are worse off for their supreme myopia.>

Yes, <tosspot of budapest>: I used a French word. Don't like it? Choke on it!!!!

<An email sent from Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump, daughter-in-law of the former president, promised that she had an announcement to make.

“I’ll be on Hannity in 1 hour to address the nation on behalf of my father-in-law,” it read, “but first I want to talk to you personally. President Trump’s enemies are spewing vicious lies about him but he’s not even allowed to defend himself! That’s why I need you to DEFEND TRUMP.”

That required defense, as you might expect, took the form of a campaign contribution.

When Lara Trump appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program, there was no announcement. There was, however, a reiteration of the rhetoric from the email.

“The scales have always been tipped against Donald Trump,” she insisted, having claimed that Hillary Clinton in 2016 colluded with Russia (she didn’t) and that in 2020, CIA agents had said the Hunter Biden laptop was fake (they didn’t). “And this year more than ever with all the lawfare, with all we’ve seen against him — in some crazy way, Sean, they’ve actually prepared him for this moment.”

“It’s rigged so heavily in Joe Biden’s favor but everything always is,” she continued, lamenting that Hollywood, the music industry (a hobbyhorse of hers at the moment) and the judiciary are stacked against the former president.

The “lawfare” and “judiciary” complaints, of course, center on the criminal trial in Manhattan. There, Trump is accused of falsifying business records to cover up a payment his attorney made to an adult-film actress before the 2016 election. But to Trump and his allies, this is simply an out-of-control law enforcement/judicial apparatus targeting a hated and feared political rival.

There’s also another angle of persecution that Team Trump has been playing up in New York. The former president’s incessant disparagement of parties to the case — prosecutors, witnesses — led the judge to impose limits on what he is allowed to say publicly. This, in turn, has been spun as more anti-Trump oppression. It is a neat little microcosm of the case, really: he is on trial for allegedly doing things that led to legal repercussions and in response to the trial did things that led to legal repercussions.

The response is the one Lara Trump put in that email: He’s not even allowed to defend himself! This comes up regularly in Fox News commentary. It’s the argument that was presented by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) when he made his pilgrimage to Lower Manhattan to stand by Trump earlier this week.

“They’re overriding his constitutional right to defend himself from political smears from his harshest critics at the most important time,” Johnson said, speaking outside the courthouse. He offered a version of the same line when speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill last week.

The idea that Trump is embattled is not new, certainly. It is and has always been central to his political pitch: He is fighting the powers that be on behalf of the forgotten common man. It is central to his appeal, as well. He is a “straight shooter” because he says the things that were long considered forbidden (often because they were false or racist or otherwise disparaging). He pledged to fight the evolution of the country, to protect those who see themselves as being left behind. As his followers would tell you, he was fighting for them — or the leading edge of an effort to take down everyone who shares his politics.

“The trial of former president Donald J. Trump is an ominous warning that we are all future defendants,” one host on a right-wing media outlet said this week. “We are all potential future defendants. Not hyperbole and, no, it’s not an over-exaggeration. It is unfortunately the state of affairs in 2024.”

But there is a shift in his rhetoric now: He is more often positioning himself defensively rather than offensively. They are coming after him aggressively because they want to keep him from helping his base, as he presents it. His fight is still on their behalf, not his own — but now he needs help.

The appearance of multiple Republican elected officials, such as Johnson, at and outside the Manhattan courthouse has been framed as their helping Trump avoid running afoul of the gag order by having surrogates attack his opponents on his behalf. But despite the rhetoric about Trump not being able to defend himself, the arguments they offer about the case are as pervasive as they are rote. What their appearance shows, instead, is an image of Republicans standing behind Trump — often literally. They are modeling what it looks like to defend Trump as he’s enduring this fight.....>