<Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and over two dozen other Senate Republicans issued a rare statement of support for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday as she visited Taiwan amid threats from Beijing.

"We support Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi's trip to Taiwan," the statement, which was also signed by prominent Republicans like Sens. John Thune, John Cornyn, Susan Collins, and Jim Risch, said.

"For decades, members of the United States Congress, including previous Speakers of the House, have travelled to Taiwan," the statement went on to say. "This travel is consistent with the United States' One China policy to which we are committed. We are also committed now, more than ever, to all elements of the Taiwan Relations Act."

The statement exemplifies how challenging China has become a bipartisan issue in Washington despite historic political divisions.

Under the One China policy, which has guided the US's approach to Taiwan for decades, the US offers diplomatic recognition to Beijing's position that there is only one Chinese government. The US also does not support Taiwan's independence, and does not have formal diplomatic relations with Taipei.

But the US maintains a robust economic partnership with Taiwan, and strong unofficial ties. Under the Taiwan Relations Act, the US government is compelled to provide Taiwan with defensive weapons. The US is Taiwan's top supplier of arms.

Ahead of Pelosi's visit to Taiwan, China warned of a possible military response. The Chinese government has contended that Pelosi's trip to the self-governing island democracy undermines the One China policy and excoriated her for making the journey.

China's Foreign Ministry in a statement on Tuesday said Pelosi's trip "gravely undermines peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, and sends a seriously wrong signal to the separatist forces for 'Taiwan independence.'"

In an op-ed for The Washington Post, Pelosi said that visiting Taiwan serves as an important sign of America's commitment to democracy.

"We cannot stand by as the [Chinese Communist Party] proceeds to threaten Taiwan — and democracy itself," Pelosi said, adding: "Indeed, we take this trip at a time when the world faces a choice between autocracy and democracy. As Russia wages its premeditated, illegal war against Ukraine, killing thousands of innocents — even children — it is essential that America and our allies make clear that we never give in to autocrats."

Pelosi, the highest-ranking US lawmaker to visit Taiwan in 25 years, also rejected the notion that her trip violated the One China policy.

China on Tuesday said it's holding live-fire military exercises close to Taiwan in response to Pelosi's visit.>

<How bad was Alex Jones’ week in court?

It was bad. He was caught lying under oath about his previous lies about the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.

And he found out that his lawyers accidentally turned over every one of his texts and emails to the attorneys for the families he has maligned.

And he was ordered to pay one of those families close to $50 million in total damages (although that number could change.)

It was an extraordinary reckoning. And it’s likely only just beginning.

“You know what perjury is, right?” one of the lawyers asked Jones.

Indeed he does.

It’s also a reminder that in today’s conservative movement, crazy is not only tolerated — it’s encouraged.

But Jones’ very bad week should also be a teachable moment. Sure, it’s a televised example of pure schadenfreude. But it’s also a reminder that in today’s conservative movement, crazy is not only tolerated — it’s encouraged. Because Jones’ toxic, anti-governmental conspiracy theories have slowly but surely infiltrated the political waters. Things that 10 years ago would have been dismissed are now being repeated in the halls of Congress. And of course, former President Donald Trump is right there in the middle of it all.

For decades now, Jones has weaponized and monetized conspiracy theories, fake outrage, lies and paranoia. He and his website have pushed theories that 9/11 was an inside job, suggested that the government may have also been behind the bombings in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people, and at the Boston Marathon, which killed three. Jones claimed that the mass shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, was a “deep state false flag operation” engineered to start a civil war. He told his followers that the mass murder at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, “was a false flag, mind-control event.” The Columbine school shootings were “100 percent false flag,” as were the attacks in Orlando, Florida, Las Vegas and San Bernardino, California.

In his post-truth world, Jones charged that the government had plans to use chemicals to turn people gay, claiming: “I have the government documents where they said they’re going to encourage homosexuality with chemicals so that people don’t have children”....>

<....And, of course, he lied about the children gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary School. He now admits that that attack was “100% real.” But that was not the story he peddled for years.

“Sandy Hook [was] ‘synthetic,’ completely fake, with actors, in my view,” Jones said in one clip played to the jury this week. “Manufactured. I couldn’t believe it at first. I knew they had actors, they are clearly, but I thought they killed some real kids. And it just shows how bold they are, that they clearly used actors, I mean, they even ended up using photos of kids killed in mass shootings … in a fake mass shooting in Turkey. Or, uh, Pakistan.”

The pain he inflicted on the families of the murdered children was unimaginable. The grieving parents were subjected to years of threats, insults and intimidation.

But, for Jones, there were few negative consequences. To the contrary, he flourished in the growing alternative reality bubble where he could drive the political narrative, regardless of fact-checkers. Instead of being shunned or marginalized, Jones found that lying was a lucrative business model that leads to celebrity and political clout. According to his own leaked text messages, at some points Jones claimed he was bringing in $800,000 a day.

But more important, as his audience grew, Jones’ conspiracy theories were amplified by others in the right-wing media ecosystem. And he was a major player in the rise of Donald Trump. Here the worlds of mainstream politics, MAGA fanaticism and fringe conspiracy theory start to collide.

As his audience grew, Jones’ conspiracy theories were amplified by others in the right-wing media ecosystem.

“Your reputation is amazing, I will not let you down,” Trump told Jones in a December 2015 appearance. Trump’s crony Roger Stone called the conspiracy theorist “the single most important voice in the alternative conservative media,” and “a valuable asset” who will “rally the people around President Trump’s legislative program.”

On the Monday after his election victory, the president-elect called Jones to thank him for his support in the campaign and promised Jones he would return to his show, a pledge that The Washington Post called “an extraordinary gesture for an incoming president whose schedule is packed with calls from world leaders and the enormous task of overseeing the transition.”

But this week, Alex Jones found himself in a court of law, where the lies finally caught up with him. And when it happened, the karma was jaw-dropping.

“This is your Perry Mason moment,” a startled Jones said after being confronted with incriminating texts and emails about Sandy Hook in open court.

Only marginally less dramatic was the rebuke from the judge presiding over the trial.

“You must tell the truth while you testify,“ Judge Maya Guerra Gamble told Jones. “This is not your show. You need to slow down and not take what you see as opportunities to further the message you’re wanting to further and instead only answer the specific and exact questions you have been asked,” she said.

When Jones tried to argue that he believed he was telling the truth, Gamble clarified the difference between an alternative reality media world and a court of law. In the law, she told him, truth was actually a real thing.

“You believe everything you say is true, but it isn’t,” she pointedly told him. “Just because you claim to think something is true does not make it true. It does not protect you. It is not allowed. You’re under oath.”

It was, by any measure, a bracing moment.

Unfortunately, however, his spectacular fall does not mean an end to Jones’ now much more common brand of political paranoia.

Jones now owes millions in damages. And it may get even worse. The Jan. 6 committee will issue subpoenas and, Jones — a serial liar — may also face perjury charges. Other law enforcement official are likely to express interest in the contents of his phone.

Unfortunately, however, his spectacular fall does not mean an end to Jones’ now much more common brand of political paranoia. Right-wing media, with nudges from the former president himself, has become habituated to Big Lies and apocalyptic conspiracy theories. Dangerous, obviously untrue theories about voter fraud and the “deep state” are now commonplace.

Dozens, if not hundreds of imitators, fellow grifters, and bottom feeders are ready to take his place. But his successors should pay close attention to the fate of Alex Jones.

Finally some hope for sanity and truth .

+100

<In Florida, some sheriffs have vowed not to enforce gun control laws they oppose and believe are unconstitutional. And Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren has vowed not to prosecute any women seeking abortions from their doctors; Warren has also vowed to protect transgender minors undergoing gender transition treatment.

Far-right Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis hasn’t gone after anti-gun control sheriffs, but the Orlando Sentinel’s Skyler Swisher reports that he has gone after Warren.

On Thursday, August 4, DeSantis declared, “We are not going to allow this pathogen that’s been around the country of ignoring the law. We are not going to let that get a foothold here in the state of Florida.”

DeSantis, Swisher reports, “said he ordered the statewide review because he was concerned prosecutors selectively enforce laws based on their political beliefs.” And Swisher adds that “only Warren was deemed to have taken positions that justified a suspension from office, DeSantis said.”

Democratic State Rep. Dan Daley, according to Swisher, is calling DeSantis out as hypocritical. Swisher quotes Daley as saying, “All you have to do is Google ‘Florida sheriff not enforcing,’ and there are so many examples, mostly related to guns. If this is the game you are going to play and tell me it’s not political, you better start suspending those people too.”

Swisher notes that Seminole County, Florida Sheriff Dennis Lemma “told gun activists he wouldn’t enforce a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would require owners of semiautomatic weapons to register them with the state.”

“The governor can suspend county officers and state officers not subject to impeachment for ‘malfeasance, misfeasance, neglect of duty, drunkenness, incompetence, permanent inability to perform official duties, or commission of a felony’ as outlined by Florida law,” Swisher reports. “The Florida Senate decides whether to permanently remove the officer. DeSantis cited ‘neglect of duty’ and ‘incompetence’ in the order suspending Warren. In the order, DeSantis accused Warren of implementing a policy of ‘presumptive non enforcement’ of certain criminal violations, including ‘trespassing at a business location, disorderly conduct, disorderly intoxication and prostitution.’ The suspension order doesn’t mention any specific cases, instead focusing on Warren’s policy positions. Warren said he hasn’t had any cases referred to his office involving abortion or gender-transition treatments.”>

'Presumptive non enforcement', is it? Wonder wot a certain sheriff of sorts, over Pensuckola way, thinks of all this.

<A week before Rudy Giuliani was set to appear before a grand jury in Georgia, his lawyers contacted local prosecutors to inform them that a recent medical procedure would prevent the former New York City mayor from flying to Atlanta, according to court records.

But his request to delay the Tuesday grand jury appearance was met with little sympathy from the office of Fanni Willis, the Fulton County district attorney investigating former President Donald Trump's efforts to flip his 2020 election loss in Georgia. Willis' office responded instead with receipts — and a tweet from New Hampshire — suggesting that Giuliani was, in fact, having no trouble traveling.

In a court filing Monday, local prosecutors in Georgia said they had obtained records showing that Giuliani had "purchased multiple airline tickets with cash, including tickets to Rome, Italy, and Zurich, Switzerland," for flights between July 22 and July 29. (Willis' office stopped short of stating that Giuliani took those flights.)

"All of those dates were after the witness's medical procedure," a prosecutor wrote, referring to Giuliani, on the eve of his scheduled grand jury appearance.

"Finally," the prosecutor added, "in light of the letter provided to the district attorney suggesting that the witness is not cleared for air travel, the district attorney offered to provide alternative methods of travel for the witness, including bus or train fare." The filing included a screenshot of a August 1 social media post picturing Giuliani in New Hampshire.

A Fulton County judge responded by setting a 12:30 pm hearing Tuesday on Giuliani's "emergency" request to delay his grand jury appearance. A lawyer for Giuliani, William H. Thomas Jr., declined to comment.

In a separate court filing Monday, Thomas conceded that Giuliani had traveled from New York to New Hampshire following his unspecified medical procedure. But he emphasized, in italics, that Giuliani made the trip "by a private car in which he was the passenger."

Pointing to a doctor's note, Thomas said it was "air travel that he was not cleared for." But Willis' office, he wrote, "remained firm in their refusal to agree to a continuance." Thomas added that Giuliani would appear virtually before the grand jury, but Willis' office has demanded in-person testimony.

"It is important to note here that Mr. Giuliani is [sic] no way seeking to inappropriately delay, or obstruct these proceedings or avoid giving evidence or testimony that is not subject to some claim of privilege in this matter," Thomas wrote. "Stated another way, he is and has been willing to cooperate in this matter subject to any ethical obligations that may preclude that cooperation."

Fani Willis' aggressive moves

The court filings Monday shed light on a dispute between local prosecutors in Georgia and Giuliani's lawyers in the buildup to his scheduled appearance before the grand jury investigating Trump and his allies' election interference in the state.

As part of the inquiry, local prosecutors are examining a now-infamous phone call Trump made to Georgia's secretary of state, Brad Raffensberger, urging him to "find" enough votes to reverse his loss to Joe Biden.

Willis has moved aggressively in recent weeks. In addition to winning a court battle forcing Giuliani to testify before a grand jury, her office has pursued fake electors who supported Trump and subpoenaed Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, prompting legal observers to view the Georgia investigation as among the most perilous for the former president.

Following the 2020 election, Giuliani was among the former president's allies who participated in a scheme to create slates of so-called alternate slates of pro-Trump electors in key battlegrounds states including Georgia. Court filings have revealed that Willis' office informed all 16 pro-Trump electors in Georgia that they could face charges in connection with the criminal investigation.

<George Conway🌻
@gtconway3d·5h
Most honest people I know aren't under FBI investigation, let alone two.

John Berman
@JohnBerman·3m
JUST NOW: Merrick Garland "doesn't do things rashly. You have to conclude there's something behind the curtain that would surprise us.">

<One day, relatively soon, the heads of the Justice Department and the FBI are likely to be brought to Capitol Hill to testify about the historic decision to raid a former president’s home.

For now, though, we don’t yet know much about what was in the search warrant used to raid Donald Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago on Monday. We do know that the raid concerned the removal of classified documents from the White House and that, according to Trump, agents raided his safe.

But we also quickly found out that a lot of influential people are rather uninterested in any of that, reflexively shouting “witch hunt” and baselessly blaming President Biden for the raid in a way that bodes very poorly for whatever comes next in this process. Trump has marshaled his army of supporters to declare, in knee-jerk fashion, any legal scrutiny of him a deep-state operation.

It’s also an army that, it bears noting, was once quite consumed with the import of document security by would-be presidential candidates — and quite happy to promote the idea that their preferred candidate ought to “lock” such an opponent “up.”

Trump immediately likened the raid to what happens in third-world countries. Plenty happily echoed that talking point, including Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and the House Judiciary Committee’s Republicans, led by Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio). “Doesn’t the FBI have better things to do than harass the former PRESIDENT?” read a tweet from the House Judiciary GOP’s account.

Another talking point promoted by the House Judiciary GOP and Fox News commentators was the idea that, if they could go after Trump like this, nobody is safe.

Many blamed Biden — Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade went so far as to say that the order for the raid “has to have come from @POTUS and/or someone in White House” — despite there being zero evidence the president had any role.

The responses from the highest levels of the GOP soon arrived, and they were equally pitched.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) assured Monday night that Garland had better be prepared to answer questions. But even without any of those questions answered, McCarthy declared: “The Department of Justice has reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization.” The Republican National Committee declared that “Democrats continually weaponize the bureaucracy against Republicans. This raid is outrageous.”

That’s a lot of firm conclusions based on not much at all. But it’s the fruit of years of Trump claiming persecution.....

....Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that this investigation hardly comes out of nowhere: Trump’s handling of government documents has long been a focal point. The Washington Post reported as far back as February on Trump’s “relentless document destruction habits.” A couple of days later, the National Archives confirmed that it had retrieved 15 boxes of documents from Mar-a-Lago — including records marked as “classified” and even “top secret” — that should have been turned over, and then asked the Justice Department to investigate, which it clearly has.

The question from there is whether this is a matter that merits a search warrant. That the Justice Department would go this route would seem to suggest it sees something potentially incriminating beyond merely shoddy record-keeping and document retention. The department knows this decision will be harshly scrutinized; going down this path only for its destination to be a minor finding, ending in a slap on the wrist, isn’t worth the blowback it’ll get from 40 to 45 percent of the country.

It also bears noting that this portion of the country was once quite laser-focused on keeping tabs on potentially sensitive government documents. Trump’s best attack on Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign was her private email server. Many of those who raised alarm bells about that were very quiet when we learned that government documents had made their way to Mar-a-Lago. (McCarthy, for one, had lambasted Clinton for what he called her “fundamental lack of judgment and wanton disregard for protecting and keeping information confidential” back in 2016.)....

....During the 2016 campaign, Trump encouraged supporters to chant “lock her up” over Clinton’s emails. He had very little compunction about using his power as president to investigate political adversaries, including on Ukraine. And whatever you think of how the Clinton investigation turned out, there was an investigation — a quite public one, involving a presidential candidate in the heat of a campaign, which might well have turned the 2016 election....>

<This is a bad week for Donald Trump and the Republican party. Already, the 45th president suffered twin humiliations and a third one looms. On Monday, the FBI enforced a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, the center of his universe. One day later, a federal appeals court upheld the right of a House committee to his tax returns. Trump is also slated to appear on Wednesday at a court-ordered deposition conducted by New York’s attorney general.

Meanwhile, voters made the Republican party pay for the US supreme court gutting Roe v Wade. In Minnesota’s special congressional election, Democrats came within five points of an upset victory in a district that Trump won by double digits. What happened in the Kansas abortion referendum didn’t just stay there.

Trump’s horrible week began with a court-approved raid on Mar-a-Lago, his safe space and shrine to himself. Breaking with history, the feds treated an ex-president with less dignity than members of the world’s most exclusive club believe themselves entitled to. Suspicion that Trump withheld key government documents when he returned others to the National Archives seven months ago appears to be at the center of the firestorm. During his final days on the job, his White House purportedly shipped 15 boxes of records to Trump’s Florida home that should instead have been routed to the National Archives.

Then again, he always had a problem with distinguishing between himself and the office. Significantly, the seizure follows a June visit to Mar-a-Lago by Jay Bratt, the chief of the counterintelligence and export control section at the justice department. The whiff of espionage now hangs in the air.

Trump’s casual approach to record keeping is well-documented. Photos of torn paper in his handwriting nestled at the bottom of commodes in DC and on the road recently graced the Axios news site, courtesy of the New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman.

Hillary Clinton, break out the popcorn. In 2016, her email and computers occupied center-stage in Trump’s brain and campaign. Chants of “lock her up” emerged as his battle cry.

Six years ago, Kevin McCarthy, then House majority leader, trashed Clinton’s judgment, and castigated her “total disregard for protecting and handling our nation’s highly classified secrets”. He also demanded an expeditious FBI investigation, together with a thorough and “transparent” briefing.

Not any more. This time, McCarthy has put Merrick Garland on notice. The attorney general will be the focal point of Republican-driven congressional investigations come next year. “I’ve seen enough,” McCarthy tweeted 20 months after he had blamed Trump’s base for the invasion of the Capitol.

Time and ambition can salve all wounds. The speaker’s gavel probably awaits him in January. For his part, the former guy has done nothing to tamp down on the ensuing uproar. Trump refuses to release a copy of the search warrant or an inventory of the removed contents. Uncertainty is his ally.

We have seen this movie before. The ex-reality show host stokes resentments even as he elides specific allegations. To date, Trump has not rebutted the substance of the House select committee’s hearings. More broadly, the search warrant directed at Trump’s Palm Beach property coupled with the aftermath of the US supreme court’s decision in Dobbs crystalize the growing divide between red and blue America. These days, the Republican party demonizes federal law enforcement and the US intelligence community as “deep state”. Talk of overreach by the national government is standard.

At the same time, the Trumpian right seeks to turn red states into a set for The Handmaid’s Tale 2.0. A 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio and her doctor in Indiana were hounded for ending the girl’s pregnancy. In Nebraska, prosecutors obtained a court order to scour Facebook for evidence that a 17-year-old woman planned a drug-induced abortion.

Said differently, opposition to federal authority should not be equated to distaste for government coercion and intrusion. As long as the diktat doesn’t emanate from the Potomac, the Republican party is fine with the long arm of the state flexing its muscle.

The Confederacy loved slavery and secession. It was fine if some were freer than others. Now Texas has set the template for turning neighbors into informants. Apparently, Governor Greg Abbott yearns to emulate East Germany and the Stasi.

Last, in Minnesota’s special congressional election, the Republican party’s Brad Finstad leads Democrat Jeff Ettinger by only four points, 51-47. Dave Wasserman, the maven of congressional elections, tweeted: “If Finstad’s margin is 5 pts or less, it would be a great result for Dems.”

<Many legal scholars in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s radical decision to reverse Roe v. Wade have focused on the dangerous implications of the court’s centuries-old worldview on protections for things such as same-sex marriage and contraception. This concern is real, but there is another issue with equally grave constitutional consequences, one that portends the emergence of a foundational alteration of American government itself.

Considered alongside two First Amendment rulings last term, the Dobbs decision marks a serious step in an emerging legal campaign by religious conservatives on the Supreme Court to undermine the bedrock concept of separation of church and state and to promote Christianity as an intrinsic component of democratic government.

The energy behind this idea was apparent in Justice Samuel Alito’s speech last month for Notre Dame Law School’s Religious Liberty Initiative in Rome. Calling it an “honor” to have penned the 6-3 majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and mocking international leaders for “lambast[ing]” the ruling, Alito spent the bulk of his remarks lamenting “the turn away from religion” in Western society. In his mind, the “significant increase in the percentage of the population that rejects religion” warrants a full-on “fight against secularism” — which Alito likened to staving off totalitarianism itself. Ignoring the vast historical record of human rights abuses in the name of religion (such as the Taliban in Afghanistan and even his own Catholic church’s role in perpetuating slavery in America), Alito identified the communist regimes of China and the Soviet Union as examples of what happens when freedom to worship publicly is curtailed. Protection for private worship, he argued, is not enough. Because “any judge who wants to shrink religious liberty” can just do it by interpreting the law, Alito insisted that there “must be limits” on that power.

The limits that Alito is referring to have begun to emerge as the court explicitly seeks to anchor its understanding of constitutional rights in early American history—or even earlier, under the English monarchy. Alito and his fellow conservatives evidently pine for a return to a more religiously homogenous, Christian society but to achieve it they are deliberately marginalizing one pillar of the First Amendment in favor of another. The dots connecting Alito’s personal mission to inculcate religion in American life and what the conservative majority is doing to the Constitution are easy to see. They begin with Dobbs.

Dobbs is significant not just because it reversed 50 years of precedent under the “due process clause” of the Fourteenth Amendment (under which the Court has recognized certain rights, even if unenumerated in the Constitution, as so bound up with the concept of liberty that the government cannot arbitrarily interfere with them). In Dobbs, Alito subverted that notion and fashioned a brand-new, two-part test for assessing the viability of individual rights: (1) whether the right is expressed in the Constitution’s text, and if not, (2) whether it existed as a matter of “the Nation’s history and tradition.” This second part of the test is the crucial one when it comes to religion — and in particular, its installation in government.

Under Dobbs’ step two, Alito time-traveled back to the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification in 1868, when women could not even vote and, in his words, “three quarters of the States made abortion a crime at all stages of pregnancy.” Alito then regressed even earlier, to 13th century England (before America’s birth), to shore up his dubious quest to excavate historical authority rejecting abortion rights. Alito gave no guidelines for identifying which chapter of history counts in this calculus. Nor did he grapple with ancient law that actually went the other way. All we know going forward is that, for this majority, text is paramount and, barring that, very old history is determinative.

Except if the text appears in the First Amendment’s “establishment clause.” In a pair of other decisions, the same conservative majority pooh-poohed explicit constitutional language mandating that “Congress shall make no laws respecting an establishment of religion,” holding that a competing part of the First Amendment — which bars the federal government from “prohibiting the free exercise” of religion — is the more important and controlling.....>

<...The government cannot establish an official religion or ban public worship. But which clause governs if a government employee openly endorses religious beliefs at work in a way that could be attributed to the government or feel coercive to subordinates? Do the employee’s free exercise rights supersede the government’s obligation to maintain secularity?

Up until this term, the answer was that government employees can worship freely like the rest of us, just not necessarily in their official capacities. In Employment Division, Department of Human Resources v. Smith, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the Court in 1990 that so long as a generally applicable law is not written in a way that targets specific religious practices, it is constitutional under the free exercise clause even if it affects religious practices. And under Lemon v. Kurtzman, the Court held in 1971 that for establishment clause purposes, the government can touch upon religion only for secular reasons, such as busing children to parochial schools, and not to promote religion, inhibit religion or foster excessive entanglement with religion.

In June, a 6-3 majority in Carson v. Makin buried the establishment clause under the free exercise clause. It held that Maine’s requirement that only “nonsectarian” private schools can receive taxpayer-funded tuition assistance violates the First Amendment because it “operates to identify and exclude otherwise eligible schools on the basis of their religious exercise.” Maine’s requirement did not single out any religion, so it passed the Smith test for free exercise claims. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out in dissent, “this Court has long recognized” that “the establishment clause requires that public education be secular and neutral as to religion.” By “assuming away an establishment clause violation,” she argued, the majority decision forces Maine taxpayers to fund religious education — in that case, schools that embrace an affirmatively Christian and anti-LGBTQ+ ideology. “[T]he consequences of the Court’s rapid transformation of the religion clauses must not be understated,” she warned, because it risks “swallowing the space between the religion clauses.”

But there’s more. In an opinion authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the same majority in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District championed a public high school football coach’s insistence on publicly praying on the field after a game, effectively overruling Lemon as an “ahistorical approach to the establishment clause.” “Here,” Gorsuch wrote, “a government entity sought to punish an individual for engaging in a brief, quiet, personal religious observance . . . on a mistaken view that it had a duty to ferret out and suppress religious observances even as it allows comparable secular speech.” The problem again, as Sotomayor complained in another dissent, is the pesky establishment clause: “This Court continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the framers fought to build.”

Especially alarming, though, is Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in Kennedy. Under the free speech clause, he noted, the Court has held that “the first Amendment protects public employee speech only when it falls within the core of First Amendment protection —speech on matters of public concern.” Other types of on-the-job speech can be restrained. But Thomas added: “It remains an open question . . . if a similar analysis can or should apply to free-exercise claims in light of the ‘history’ and ‘tradition’ of the free exercise clause.” (Emphasis supplied.) In other words, although free speech in government employment is limited, U.S. history and tradition may signal a different outcome for religion in government....>

<....After Dobbs, history and tradition at the time of the framing of the Constitution are now the linchpin of constitutional interpretation. And Thomas has explicitly connected the founding period — and national identity — with Christianity. In September 2021, he delivered a lecture about his Catholicism at the Notre Dame School of Law, linking Christianity and the founding as motivation for returning to his own faith: “As I rediscovered the God-given principles of the Declaration [of Independence] and our founding, I eventually returned to the Church, which had been teaching the same truths for millennia. [T]he Declaration endures because it . . . reflects the noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to his creatures.” In his recent speech, Alito recounted a personal experience in a Berlin museum when he encountered a “well-dressed woman and a young boy” looking at a rustic (presumably Christian) wooden cross. The boy asked, “Who is that man?” Alito perceived the child’s question as “a harbinger of what’s in store for our culture” — “hostility to religion or at least the traditional religious beliefs that are contrary to the new moral code that is ascendant in some sectors.”

Although less publicly explicit than Alito and Thomas about his views on religion in government, Gorsuch privately spoke in 2018 to the Thomistic Institute, a group that “exists to promote Catholic truth in our contemporary world by strengthening the intellectual formation of Christians . . . in the wider public square.” Justice Amy Coney Barrett has written that “[Catholic judges] are obliged . . . . to adhere to their church’s teaching on moral matters,” and gave a commencement address to Notre Dame law graduates advising that a “legal career is but a means to an end, and . . . . that end is building the kingdom of God.”

These views represent a marked departure from traditional judicial conservatism on the Supreme Court. In Zuni Public School Dist. No. 89 v. Department of Education, Justice Scalia in 2007 heavily criticized the Court’s 1892 declaration in Holy Trinity v. United States that the historical record of America demonstrated that the United States “is a Christian nation.” The Court has since “wisely retreated from” that view, he retorted.

Historical accounts at the time of the 1787 Constitutional Convention indicate that the Framers and political leaders largely believed that governmental endorsements of religion would result in tyranny and persecution. There was a “concerted campaign” from the Anti-Federalists to “discredit the Constitution as irreligious, which for many of its opponents was its principal flaw,” along with repeated attempts to add Christian verbiage to the Constitution. The ultimate rejection of religious language demonstrates that the Founders intended constitutional secularity. In his dissenting opinion in Carson, Justice Stephen Breyer quoted James Madison to underscore the point: “[C]ompelled taxpayer sponsorship of religion ‘is itself a signal of persecution,’ which ‘will destroy that moderation and harmony which the forbearance of our laws to intermeddle with Religion, has produced amongst its several sects.’”

As scholar Mokhtar Ben Barka explains, however, by the time the Court issued the opinion in Holy Trinity, “nineteenth-century America was a mild form of Protestant theocracy. In this period, Protestantism was America’s de facto established religion” and Protestants overwhelmingly held power in the government. Alas, there are plenty of historical cherries to pick if the Court – as it did in Dobbs – decides to tether non-secular government in “history and tradition.”

Keep in mind, too, that as Elizabeth Dias recently chronicled for the New York Times, the push for a Christian government is sweeping GOP politics, as well. At Cornerstone Christian Center, a church near Aspen, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) received a standing ovation after urging that “[t]he church is supposed to direct the government.” Republican nominee for Pennsylvania governor, Doug Mastriano, likewise called the separation of church and state a “myth.” “In November we are going to take our state back,” he said. “My God will make it so.”

Although polls show that declaring the United States a conservative Christian nation is a minority view, the same was said about the reversal of Roe. This Supreme Court clearly doesn’t care.>

<In Gloria Steinem’s 2015 memoir, “My Life on the Road,” she writes about Florynce Kennedy, the great civil rights activist and lawyer, teaching her to deal with hecklers.

The two women lectured on college campuses together in the 1970s, and the crowds always included a few people determined to disrupt them. Kennedy’s advice?

“Just pause, let the audience absorb the hostility, then say, ‘I didn’t pay him to say that.’”

Nothing like a heckler, after all, to underscore what your movement is up against — and, quite often, to reveal the opposition’s moral character.

“Ultimately,” Steinem wrote, “they educate an audience.”

I thought about that anecdote during the recent great Matt Gaetz own. The Florida congressman delivered a remarkably loathsome — even for him — set of remarks at a recent summit for Turning Point USA, a conservative youth activist organization.

“Why is it that the women with the least likelihood of getting pregnant are the ones most worried about abortions?” Gaetz asked the crowd. “Nobody wants to impregnate you if you look like a thumb.”

He continued: “These people are odious from the inside out. They’re like, 5-foot-2, 350 pounds, and they’re like, ‘Give me my abortions or I’ll get up and march and protest.’”

Olivia Julianna, a 19-year-old political strategist with Gen Z for Change, hopped on Twitter to push back.

“I’m actually 5’11. 6’4 in heels,” she tweeted. “I wear them so small men like you are reminded of your place.”

Gaetz fired back, tweeting a photo of Olivia and the words “Dander raised…”....>

Indeed.>

<Watergate whistleblower John Dean has slammed former President Donald Trump's comparison of the FBI's search of his Mar-a-Lago resort to Richard Nixon's 1972 scandal.

"It's pathetic. It shows he has no knowledge of what happened with Watergate," Dean told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Thursday evening.

"Watergate was much more than a break-in of course. There was a cover-up and really it brought forth the evidence of Nixon's abuse of power," he added.

Dean also bashed Trump's lashing out at the FBI and the Department of Justice, comparing it to how Nixon reacted to his downfall because of Watergate.

"Nixon was an institutionalist. He wouldn't attack the FBI or Department of Justice in a blatant and blind way that Trump is. He knew those people," Dean said.

"These are hard-working people who really have the best interests of the country in mind," he continued. "So I think Trump's attacks are so far off-base, as are the Republican party's."

Dean served as White House counsel for Nixon during the Watergate scandal. He was personally involved in the cover-up when he facilitated hush money payments to the burglars who broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in June 1972.

He later testified and became the first White House official to tie Nixon directly to the scandal, making him a key whistleblower in the affair. Now a political commentator for CNN, Dean has regularly criticized Trump and the Republican party in recent years.

The former president referenced Watergate in his Monday statement revealing that the search had taken place. "What is the difference between this and Watergate, where operatives broke into the Democrat National Committee?" Trump asked. "Here, in reverse, Democrats broke into the home of the 45th President of the United States."

Several experts who studied Watergate said the two incidents are wholly different, Insider's Lloyd Lee reported. While Watergate involved private citizens hired by Nixon's campaign to commit a crime, the Mar-a-Lago raid was conducted by FBI agents and authorized by a search warrant to investigate a crime, they noted.

While the warrant for Trump's home has been kept under wraps, Attorney General Merrick Garland has asked for the warrant and other records related to the raid to be unsealed.

Dean said on Thursday that it was "foolish" for Trump to make claims about the Mar-a-Lago search in his public statement, as he may now find it difficult to argue that the warrant should be kept sealed for his privacy.

"I think that's a bad position for Trump to be in, to make all these claims and then keep it secret. So he's between a rock and a hard place today," he said.>

Lie and steal in haste, repent at leisure.

<A judge has released the warrant and inventory from the search executed at former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago property.

The filing, which includes two attachments ("Attachment A" and "Attachment B"), indicates that the Justice Department, in its search of the Mar-a-Lago estate, is investigating potential violation of at least three separate criminal statutes, including a statute under the Espionage Act.

Attachment B states that the property to be seized by agents includes "all physical documents and records constituting evidence, contraband, fruits of crime or other items illegally possessed" in violation of 18 USC 793, a statute under the Espionage Act involving the gathering, transmitting or loss of defense information; 18 USC 2071, which involves any federal government employee who, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies or destroys public records; and 18 USC 1519, obstruction of justice.

Under the receipt showing property that was seized from Trump's estate, agents note they recovered 11 sets of documents of various classifications ranging from confidential to top secret and sensitive compartmented information.

The receipt identifies one set referring to "various classified/TS/SCI documents," four sets of top secret documents, three sets of secret documents and three sets of documents described as confidential. It appears that there were 21 boxes taken.

Other items included in the receipt include one labeled "Info re: President of France," an executive grant of clemency for Trump ally Roger Stone, binders of photos, a "potential presidential record" and a leather-bound box of documents.

Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich said, "The Biden administration is in obvious damage control after their botched raid where they seized the President’s picture books, a 'hand written note,' and declassified documents. This raid of President Trump's home was not just unprecedented, but unnecessary -- and now they are leaking lies and innuendos to try to explain away the weaponization of government against their dominant political opponent."...>

<Rep. Jim Jordan's (R-OH) Twitter account became an object of mockery after he tweeted a message that seemed to betray a lack of comprehension of basic legal principles.

Following the FBI's execution of a search warrant at former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Jordan tweeted, "If they can do it to a former President, imagine what they can do to you."

The tweet referenced the search warrant of Trump's property, which HuffPost noted involves "a legal process that would involve investigators convincing a federal judge or magistrate that evidence of a crime would likely be found during a search."

Twitter users quickly fired back with critical remarks. "The fact that the law applies to the president, and not just the rest of us, is a feature of democracy, not a bug," The Atlantic's Yair Rosenberg remarked.

"Thank you, House Judiciary GOP, for summarizing succinctly the principle of 'the rule of law': the law applies to everyone, even a former President," replied Twitter used Julia Loffe.

"Yes, if you break the law and steal top secret documents from the White House and commit some of the most heinous crimes in American history, this too can happen to you," added government watchdog Medias Touch. "That’s a GREAT precedent! That’s called justice."

"If I stole classified documents from the White House (allegedly), I certainly hope they'd do it to me," Twitter user Bob Cessa added. "Please explain why they shouldn't, a-holes."

Jordan has made several demands that FBI Director Christopher Wray appear before Congress to explain the bureau’s decision to search former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.

Wray, a 2018 Trump appointee, did address the press Wednesday in Omaha but not on any potential appearance before Congress.

Instead, he focused on Trump’s accusation that the agency could have planted evidence in the search stating, “I’m sure you can appreciate that’s not something that I can talk about so I’d refer you to the department.”

“Any threats made against law enforcement, including the men and women of the FBI, any law enforcement agency, are deplorable and dangerous," he added.>