<Montana’s House gave final passage Friday to a bill banning the social media app TikTok from operating in the state, a move that’s bound to face legal challenges but also serve as a testing ground for the TikTok-free America many national lawmakers envision due to concerns over potential Chinese spying.

The House voted 54-43 in favor of the measure, which would make Montana the first state with a total ban on the app. It goes further than prohibitions already put in place by nearly half the states — including Montana — and the U.S. federal government that prohibit TikTok on government-owned devices.

The measure now goes to Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte, who declined to say Friday if he plans to sign it into law. A statement provided by spokesperson Brooke Metrione said the governor “will carefully consider” all bills the Legislature sends to his desk.

Gianforte banned TikTok on state government devices last year, saying at the time that the app posed a “significant risk” to sensitive state data.

TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter promised a legal challenge over the measure’s constitutionality, saying the bill’s supporters “have admitted that they have no feasible plan” to enforce “this attempt to censor American voices.”

The company “will continue to fight for TikTok users and creators in Montana whose livelihoods and First Amendment rights are threatened by this egregious government overreach,” Oberwetter said.

TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese tech company ByteDance, has been under intense scrutiny over worries it could hand over user data to the Chinese government or push pro-Beijing propaganda and misinformation on the platform. Leaders at the FBI and the CIA and numerous lawmakers, both Democrats and Republicans, have raised such concerns but have not presented any evidence that it has happened.

Ban supporters point to two Chinese laws that compel companies in the country to cooperate with the government on state intelligence work. They also cite troubling episodes such as a disclosure by ByteDance in December that it fired four employees who accessed the IP addresses and other data of two journalists while attempting to uncover the source of a leaked report about the company.

Congress is considering legislation that does not single out TikTok specifically but gives the Commerce Department the ability more broadly to restrict foreign threats on tech platforms. That bill is being backed by the White House, but it has received pushback from privacy advocates, right-wing commentators and others who say the language is too expansive.

Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, whose office drafted the state’s legislation, said in a social media post Friday that the bill “is a critical step to ensuring we are protecting Montanans’ privacy,” even as he acknowledged that a court battle looms.

The measure would prohibit downloads of TikTok in the state and would fine any “entity” — an app store or TikTok — $10,000 per day for each time someone “is offered the ability” to access or download the app. There would not be penalties for users.

The ban would not take effect until January 2024 and would become void if Congress passes a national measure or if TikTok severs its connections with China.

The bill was introduced in February, just weeks after a Chinese spy balloon drifted over Montana, but had been drafted prior to that.

A representative from the tech trade group TechNet told state lawmakers that app stores do not have the ability to geofence apps on a state-by-state basis, so the Apple App Store and Google Play Store could not enforce the law.

Ashley Sutton, TechNet’s executive director for Washington state and the northwest, said Thursday that the “responsibility should be on an app to determine where it can operate, not an app store.”

Knudsen, the attorney general, has said that apps for online gambling can be disabled in states that do not allow it, so the same should be possible for TikTok.>

<If you are following the issue of abortion right now you almost surely have a headache. There is just so much happening all over the country that it's very hard to wrap your head around what's going on and how to fight it. This was the predictable outcome of overruling Roe v. Wade to "send it back to the states" because it was always part of the anti-abortion movement strategy. Instead of fighting on one front at the national level, pro-choice advocates would be forced to fight on many different fronts in many different ways while at the same time battling back one attempt after another in the federal courts to degrade the right in the states where it is legal. The final goal remains a national ban even if they have to get it done incrementally.

This was always obvious by the fact that while they always piously proclaimed that abortion is murder while at the same time insisting that they merely wanted to return the issue to the states, as if it was fine with them if some states decided to keep it legal. What they really wanted to do was disperse the resources and energy and wear down the opposition.

So far, it isn't working.

If anything, they have galvanized the pro-choice majority and it's wreaking havoc on Republican politics. In red states they have managed to enact all the draconian policies they dreamed of post-Roe — and that effort is ongoing. Just last night, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law a ban on abortion after six weeks. But he did it in a closed door ceremony and didn't announce it until 11 pm, illustrating how dicey abortion politics have become for politicians with national ambitions.

Even Donald Trump is having trouble negotiating the issue with his most devoted followers. According to Rolling Stone, he's been meeting with evangelical leaders and trying to convince them that abortion is a loser and they need to change their approach. He tells them they must stop talking about bans and start emphasizing "exceptions" instead because otherwise Democrats will paint him as an "extremist." And when he's asked about how he plans to advocate for their cause in the future, he resorts to bragging about his past accomplishments (which basically consists of signing the three Supreme Court nomination papers that were pressed into his hands by Mitch McConnell and the Federalist Society's Leonard Leo.)

His supporters were not amused. One wondered if Trump was "going to try to make us swallow getting next to nothing in return for our support?"

The final goal remains a national ban even if they have to get it done incrementally.

Apparently, Trump's telling anyone who will listen that the Republicans are "getting killed" on abortion, which is true, and Republicans in Washington are freaking out, as Rolling Stone reports:

In recent weeks, numerous emergency meetings — focused on abortion-related messaging and the potential for compromises — have been held by conservatives in nonprofit organizations, on Capitol Hill, and in elite Republican and evangelical circles, multiple sources familiar with the situation attest. "The 'Dobbs effect' is real and maybe devastating," says one Republican member of Congress, referencing the Dobbs v. Jackson case the Supreme Court used to overturn Roe v. Wade, who requested anonymity to speak freely. "And there isn't a solution that everyone can rally around yet."

Trump seems to think that if the anti-abortion zealots will just agree to allow some exceptions for rape and incest (and maybe the health of the mother) that the whole thing will calm down and everyone can go back to the way it was. Sure, Don.

First of all, even if the anti-abortion zealots were to agree, the genie is out of the bottle. Roe was overturned and the battle for women's autonomy isn't going to magically disappear because they agree to allow for an exception for rape and incest, which until fairly recently was supported by most pro-lifers. The right to abortion is supported by a large majority of Americans and that majority is growing. Gallup polls from last May show support for abortion in all or most cases at 85%, higher than when polling began in 1975 (76%). With those numbers it's not surprising that a recent PRRI poll found that in only seven states is there a majority against abortion rights: South Dakota (42% say it should be legal), Utah (42%), Arkansas (43%), Oklahoma (45%), Idaho (49%), Mississippi (49%) and Tennessee (49%). Not one state in the country had more than 14% saying it should be illegal in all circumstances....>

<....Unfortunately, those numbers are not going to deter the anti-choice movement and the institutions that support it, including the churches that wield massive influence on the Republican Party.

And there are activist right wing members of the judiciary ready to step in, as we've seen with the Texas judge who banned one of the medical abortion drugs and an appeals court which upheld one of the worst aspects of his ruling by calling up the archaic Comstock Act banning the use of the mail to transport it. In doing so, they've also put the FDA's ability to regulate all drugs at the mercy of a full variety of zealots who seek to interfere in all Americans' private medical decisions. (Just wait for the vaccine cases to hit the courts.) The Supreme Court will now have to sort it all out. What could go wrong?

And then there are the activists:

"If you're ignoring abortion [as a 2024 Republican candidate], you do so at your own peril," says Kristan Hawkins, president of Students For Life of America. Lila Rose, the founder of the like-minded group Live Action, argues: "What the GOP needs to be doing is doubling down on what makes them even have any kind of competitive advantage over the opposing party: that they defend families, they defend the vulnerable..."

Lila Rose believes the GOP's national policy should be a total ban with no exceptions and she holds Trump responsible for going wobbly on the issue.

Meanwhile, the pragmatists in the party seem to be drifting toward some kind of 15 week "compromise" but they need look no further than Ron DeSantis who had already signed one into law yet felt compelled to push for the more draconian 6 week ban under pressure from the right as he tries to gain traction in the GOP primary. There is no reason to believe that he will be able to finesse this any better than Trump will.

They brought this on themselves. For decades they encouraged and enabled a religious right extremist faction in their party to seize power (even tacitly encouraging anti-abortion terrorism) secure in the knowledge that they would be thwarted in their goals by Roe v. Wade. They allowed them to demagogue the issue as murder, genocide and even a holocaust apparently thinking that it was all just politics. Now this has become inconvenient and these people are being asked to stand down. Apparently, they didn't know that "sending it to the states" was just the anti-abortion movement's strategy and they never meant a word of it. The GOP is stuck with a political albatross around its neck and it's choking on it. >

<On April 6, the Tennessee House of Representatives voted to expel two Democratic lawmakers for disrupting the chamber to protest gun violence. It was an exercise of raw political muscle, a move by Republicans to punish two young Black men for refusing to abide by rules of decorum, and to send a message.

On Monday, the Nashville Metropolitan Council voted to appoint Justin Jones to fill his newly open seat. On Wednesday, Shelby County commissioners followed suit and reappointed Justin Pearson too. These are sharp replies from two progressive bodies to the legislature.

Conflict between different levels of government is nothing new, but the eagerness by both sides to thumb their nose at opponents is emblematic of what we might call total politics. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, nations pioneered “total war,” in which every element of society was mobilized and became fair game for military operations—the goal was simply to win. Total politics applies the same approach to partisan conflicts. Those in power use every legal tool at their disposal to gain advantage, with little regard for the long-term downsides. Total politics dismisses both the existence and value of neutral institutions;, it (mostly) respects rules but not norms. All that matters is what’s possible, not what’s prudent.

Total politics is everywhere you look. In just the past week or two it’s popped up in Austin, Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott has announced his intention to request a pardon for a man convicted of murdering a Black Lives Matter protester, even before proceedings are complete. Elsewhere in the state, in Amarillo, conservatives sought to put an incendiary abortion case into the hands of a federal judge they correctly believed would grant them the decision they wanted. Total politics is in Manhattan, where District Attorney Alvin Bragg brought 34 felony counts in a vague case against former President Donald Trump. It’s in Wisconsin, where a progressive candidate defeated a conservative incumbent to claim a nonpartisan judicial seat, in a race featuring unusually partisan campaigns fueled by outside money, and where Republicans in the state legislature responded by threatening to impeach her even before she’s heard a single case. It’s in Montana, where GOP lawmakers want to rewrite election laws for one cycle and one race only, to make it easier to defeat incumbent Democratic Senator Jon Tester. It’s in Washington, where some House Republicans are pushing to reinstate a rule that would allow them to target specific federal employees by reducing their salaries.

This kind of behavior is often called “constitutional hardball,” but that term is flawed. Not only is it reminiscent of the former MSNBC host Chris Matthews, but also (somewhat in contrast to that association) it sounds like a good thing: Who wouldn’t want their representatives to play hardball? Calling it “total politics” better reflects how these maneuvers enlist every aspect of government, including ostensibly neutral, nonpartisan elements, into a ruthless battle. The essential characteristic of total politics is that it uses real powers that exist under the law— although its practitioners sometimes also use other means—but pushes them to their limits.

The recent boom in total politics likely stems from a rising sense that politics is life-and-death and every election represents an existential threat to the country as one or the other party conceives of it. If you view each election and each battle as apocalyptic, then the sensible choice is to use any means available, no matter the long-term consequences: After all, if you lose (the thinking goes), the long-term consequences are irrelevant.

This tendency is particularly pronounced on the right, where Trump has argued that he is the only force that can save America as conservatives know and love it, and his acolytes have compared elections to Flight 93. That might explain why so many of the examples of total politics here come from Republicans, though Democrats are not immune. In recent years, some Democrats have explicitly called for progressives to adopt the tactics (though not the policies) of more extreme right-wing factions like the House Freedom Caucus....>

<....Tennessee provides a vivid example of how total politics draws on existing powers but produces novel and negative consequences. The House has a mechanism for expelling members, and it exercised it. The law also provides for home-county commissions to fill the seats, though the framers probably didn’t intend for expelled lawmakers to be sent right back. The question is what’s appropriate and politically wise. The House has used its expulsion power only twice since the 1800s. The recent instance displayed racist dynamics at work, given that members declined to expel a third lawmaker, a white woman, who had protested alongside the two who were expelled. As my colleague David Frum tweeted, “The Tennessee Republicans are now represented as bigots and Ku Kluxers. Maybe they deserve it. If not, then they’re idiots.” The expulsions were both an abuse of power and totally legal.

Tennessee is, as my colleague Ron Brownstein writes, more an omen than an outlier. One reason the legislature feels safe moving so truculently is that Republicans enjoy a gerrymandered majority that is all but immune to challenge. This is itself a product of total politics: In states across the country, partisans (especially in the GOP) have pursued the most aggressive gerrymanders they can sustain under the law.

Similarly, it’s legal for plaintiffs to game the federal-court system to try to draw a favorable judge. For example, anti-abortion activists who sued the federal government over approval of mifepristone, a drug used in abortions, knew that by filing suit in the Amarillo division, their case would almost certainly be assigned to Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee with strong anti-abortion views. They got Kacsmaryk, and they got the ruling they wanted—a decision saying that the FDA’s decision was improper. Judge shopping, as this is known, is a loophole that exists in the system and is used by plaintiffs of many political views from time to time, though conservatives have in recent years employed it with particular effectiveness. But it also plainly makes a mockery of the hope that judges will rule impartially and that justice is roughly equal in any federal court anywhere in the United States, and it thus delegitimizes the judiciary.

Identifying what is total politics and what’s a reasonable reaction to a new situation is naturally somewhat in the eye of the beholder. For example, some Republicans claimed that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe and the first impeachment of Donald Trump were both this sort of legal-but-abusive tactic. (Never mind that Mueller was appointed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, a Republican Trump appointee.) Proportionality is a good test: Trump was impeached for trying to extort Ukraine for his own political gain; the Tennessee lawmakers used a bullhorn on the floor of the legislature. Which of these seems to merit a very rare sanction?>

<....Donald Trump’s bid to stay in power following the 2020 election is a good example for understanding the boundaries of total politics. In attempting to subvert the election, Trump and his allies employed some tools of total politics, including an aggressive suite of lawsuits and explorations of how state legislatures could set aside popular votes using existing laws. As they were quick to point out, some of these steps echoed measures that Democrats had contemplated or employed in the past. But committed to the pursuit of victory, Trump went a step further, not just pushing rules to their limits but actively violating them. The campaign sought to seize voting machines, pressured election officials to tamper with results, and ascribed invented powers to the vice president.

Total politics is enticing because it dangles the prospect of crushing opponents without having to bend or break any rules. In practice, however, it not only undermines the legitimacy of the system and the results it produces—see the widespread criticism of Kacsmaryk’s decision—but it encourages a cycle of escalation. By sending the two legislators back to Nashville, the councils in Tennessee are escalating an existing conflict, where in the past they might have sought to smooth things over with the state government. To be fair, the Nashville Metro Council already has some bad blood with the state legislature—thanks to an ongoing total-politics attempt to shrink the council in retaliation for blocking the 2024 Republican National Convention from coming to Music City.

The combination of this alarmist approach and the recursive nature of total politics, encouraging the same from its targets, means that it is only likely to become even more ubiquitous. The limits of decorum and precedent will continue to loosen, and the valorization—some might say pretense—of impartial court systems and law enforcement will be less and less regarded. It’s hard to imagine anything breaking the cycle of total politics other than some sort of crisis—and a crisis is just what this cycle may bring.>

<Ron DeSantis, a likely candidate for the president in 2024, appears to be pandering to Trump’s MAGA crowds as Florida’s governor joined the Pro-Russian propaganda.

DeSantis declared that US support for Ukraine is not a “vital” national interest, which enraged many Republican senators.

Republican Senators Vs. DeSantis

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham spoke to CNN, explaining that if Putin isn’t stopped, this will go further, and adding, “To say this doesn’t matter is to say that war crimes don’t matter,”

Sen. John Cornyn from Texas also wanted answers. He stated, “Gov. DeSantis is a veteran. He’s a smart guy. I think he’s a been a very good governor, and I don’t understand him saying that Ukraine isn’t important to the United States.”

Sen. Marco Rubio said in a radio interview, “It’s not a territorial dispute in the sense that any more than it would be a territorial dispute if the United States decided that it wanted to invade Canada or take over the Bahamas.”

The Governor Wrote To Tucker Carlson

DeSantis’ disinterest in Russia’s attack on Ukraine was submitted to Fox News’s Tucker Carlson.

In a statement, DeSantis further wrote, “We cannot prioritize intervention in an escalating foreign war over the defense of our own homeland, especially as tens of thousands of Americans are dying every year from narcotics smuggled across our open border and our weapons arsenals critical for our own security are rapidly being depleted.”

DeSantis Had Different Views

DeSantis’ views clearly dramatically changed in the past few years. CNN reports that he “urged sending ‘defensive and offensive’ weapons to Ukraine in 2014 and 2015 and even voted to refuse to fund a new missile defense treaty with Russia until they withdrew from Ukraine.”

In 2017, DeSantis criticized Democrats for not supporting sending aid to Ukraine.

Despite the criticism from his party, DeSantis most likely hopes to score points even among Trump’s supporters.

However, social media users are less than thrilled.

Social Media Users Are Fuming

A Reddit user compared him to Putin, “Desantis is a bureaucratically inclined fascist authoritarian. He uses the cloak of democracy to persecute and punish the “other,” like no one else has in government in our history, even in the darkest days of Regan [sic] or Nixon, there were still people fighting the good fight, but Desantis will make certain those people are sued, abused, attacked, arrested, deported, or conveniently silenced. Just… like… Putin.”

Another shared, “When they say “America first” they really mean “our party first.” Fascism is about an in-group.”

Someone created a theory, “He’s courting them and wants them to interfere with the elections as they did with Trump.”

This person shared, “Another Putin puppet in the Republican Party.”

Some Made Jokes

One person joked, “He really is taking this “Florida Man” bit to the next level.”

Another wrote, “Guess the checks cleared.” This person echoed the previous comment, “Why wouldn't you when you're directly funded by Russian money?”

Some wanted to take action, “It’s time for a business and tourism boycott of Florida and any other state governed by a MAGA nazi.”

Another said, “So the guy that’s acting like a fascist dictator likes fascist dictators? That’s crazy.”

This person wrote, “He can’t afford to be on Putin’s bad side though – if he is, he gets 10,000 full-time paid trolls on the warpath against him all through the primaries.”

Ukraine Invites DeSantis To Visit

Ukraine has invited DeSantis to visit upon hearing he dismissed the Russian invasion as a “territorial dispute.”

Ukraine’s foreign ministry spokesman Oleg Nikolenko said: “We invite him to visit Ukraine to get a deeper understanding of Russia’s full-scale invasion and the threats it poses to US interests.”

He added, “We are sure that as a former military officer deployed to a combat zone, Governor Ron DeSantis knows the difference between a ‘dispute’ and war.”

Do you think DeSantis could attract Trump’s voters, considering how much the two appear to despise each other? Or was this a reckless move on his part?>

Do your worst, <putin's whore>!!!

<Clarence Thomas’ tenure on the Supreme Court from the beginning has been riddled with controversy. Consider his hyper-radical views of the Constitution; his rejection of precedent; his years of silence during oral arguments; his penchant to cite himself always and often (in his concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center, the abortion case, he cited himself 21 times!) One suspects that his opinions dealing with race convey a sense of bitterness at being seen as a beneficiary of affirmative action and his bitterness at being mistreated at his confirmation hearing when he was accused by a female employee of sexual misconduct and called the proceedings a “High-tech lynching.”

The fact that his wife was involved in communications about subverting the 2020 election and his dissents from every case in which the court rejected Donald Trump’s meritless petitions have not enhanced Justice Thomas’ reputation. Another quality in Justice Thomas’ jurisprudence that I have commented on is his gratuitous cruelty. See “Clarence Thomas’ Cruel and Dishonest Opinion Shouldn’t Be Forgotten,” Law and Crime, July 1, 2019; “Gratuitous Cruelty in Justice Thomas’ Jurisprudence,” New York Law Journal, Aug. 25, 2022.

Currently, the controversy has shifted from Thomas’ jurisprudence to his ethics. It has been reported that Thomas, for many years, received the largesse of billionaire GOP megadonor Harlan Crow, involving numerous international vacations on Crow’s superyacht, flights on his private jet, and stays at his private resort in the Adirondacks.

A 10-day trip to Indonesia in 2019 on Crow’s superyacht would have cost Thomas $500,000. None of Crow’s largesse was reported on Thomas’ annual financial disclosure forms, which every federal employee is required to report. Thomas’ explanation?

“Early in my tenure at the Court, I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable,” Thomas wrote. “I have endeavored to follow that counsel throughout my tenure and have always sought to comply with the disclosure guidelines.”

Thomas is incorrect, according to former ethics lawyers for Congress and the White House. Gifts of transportation, such as private jet flights, must be reported under the federal Ethics in Government Act. Thomas implicitly acknowledged as much when he disclosed similar flights in the late 1990s, including one on Crow’s jet in 2014.

Now, in an even more controversial report, it appears that in 2014 Crow purchased a string of properties in a residential area in Savannah, Georgia; a single-story home and two vacant lots down the road. The seller on the deal was Clarence Thomas and his relatives. The transaction marks the first known instance of money flowing from Crow to Thomas.

Crow bought the properties from Thomas for $133,363, according to a state tax document and a deed dated Oct. 15, 2014. Crow, through this purchase, now owned the house where Thomas’ elderly mother was living. Soon after the sale was completed, contractors for Crow began improvements on the house involving tens of thousands of dollars on the two-bedroom, one-bathroom home.

The renovations included a carport, a repaired roof and a new fence and gates, according to city permit records and blueprints....>

<....Federal disclosure law requires justices and other officials to disclose the details of real estate sales over $1,000. Thomas never disclosed his sale of the Savannah properties, which appears to violate the law. The disclosure form Thomas filed that year also had a space to report the buyer’s identity in any private transaction, such as a real estate deal. That space is blank. Given the role Crow played in subsidizing the lifestyle of Thomas and his wife, it is not unreasonable to wonder whether this real estate deal was an effort to put cash in Thomas’ pocket. Thomas’ mother still resides in the home.

Crow said he purchased Thomas’ mother’s house, where Thomas spent part of his childhood, to preserve it for posterity. However, Crow did not explain why he also purchased two vacant lots from Thomas down the street. He claimed that “the other lots were later sold to a vetted builder who was committed to improving the quality of the neighborhood and preserving its historical integrity.” Nor is it entirely clear whether Crow’s intentions have any bearing on Thomas’ legal obligation to disclose the sale.

Curiously, Thomas’ financial disclosure form for that year lists everything in detail, from a “stained glass medallion” he received from Yale to a life insurance policy. But he failed to report his sale to Crow.

Thomas’ obligation to report the real estate deal was clear. He had earlier reported the property as an asset. Selling it was a transaction that necessitated disclosure.

So here are some questions for Thomas: Why did Thomas fail to disclose Crow’s purchase of his mother’s home? Did Thomas or his mother pay Crow for the expensive renovations? If the renovations were a gift, why did Thomas not report them? Why did Thomas fail to disclose the extravagant vacations he took at Crow’s expense? Who were the persons who advised Thomas that he didn’t have to report the multi-year extravagant vacations he received for free from Crow? Why did Thomas never report over $1.6 million his wife received from several Republican-affiliated sources even though federal disclosure law requires listing a spouse’s sources of income?

The Ethics in Government Act requires judges to file annual financial reports and the consequences for failing to comply. In the case of a judge’s failure to comply, the Judicial Conference is required to refer to the Attorney General the name of any individual who has willfully failed to file the required information. A violation can result in criminal penalties.

As of this writing, it’s not clear where the Thomas case is headed. But on one point, there appears to be a consensus: the Supreme Court’s reputation, now at an all-time low, needs an ethics overhaul.>

<Republican Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan has been busy since he became chairman of the House Judiciary Committee in January. Under the banner of investigating whether the government is unfairly targeting and silencing conservatives, he’s been issuing subpoenas to a host of top officials across the White House and beyond. One of them recently backfired: Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is suing Jordan over a subpoena he issued to a former assistant DA.

The lawsuit argues that Jordan is interfering with Bragg’s investigation into Donald Trump, since Jordan subpoenaed Mark Pomerantz, the man who formerly led the DA’s investigation into Trump and wrote a book about the experience.

Jordan’s spree has been fueled by a key concession that his fellow far-right Republicans won from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy at the start of the 118th Congress: the formation of a new subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government.

Since it falls under the Judiciary committee, the weaponization subcommittee has the power to investigate the executive branch, including ongoing criminal investigations—allowing Jordan, one of the loudest firebrands in the GOP, to subpoena some of the White House’s biggest figures. (Ironically, Jordan himself ignored a congressional subpoena he received from the House Jan. 6 committee.)

Since the subcommittee’s inaugural hearing in February, it’s launched investigations into how the DOJ handled efforts to address violent threats against school board members and how the Federal Trade Commission worked with Twitter to suppress ring-wing viewpoints on the platform.

It hasn’t produced much in the way of evidence so far, and seems to be using hearings to regurgitate conspiracy theories—Hunter Biden’s laptop, FBI misconduct towards Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s emails (sigh). At one point, the subcommittee’s top Democrat, Rep. Stacey Plaskett, accused Jordan of “weaponizing Congress” and simply using it to settle scores.

Just over 100 days into the 118th Congress, what have they been up to? Mostly interviewing members of the Biden Administration on issues that amplify the far-right’s agenda. Here are some of the biggest names Jordan has demanded to talk to:

Attorney General Merrick Garland

Garland appeared before the subcommittee to discuss a memo the DOJ issued in 2021, a time when COVID-19 measures and fights about what to include in school curricula were leading to confrontations at school board meetings.

The National School Board Association wrote to President Joe Biden asking the DOJ to help protect school board members and educators they believed were “susceptible to acts of violence.” The letter equated the attacks on school officials to “domestic terrorism and hate crimes.” In response, the DOJ directed federal and state law enforcement to work together to address the threats.

The NSBA eventually walked back its letter, apologizing for “some of the language” included.

But Jordan holds up this now-withdrawn memo as a Biden administration attempt to label parents voicing their concerns as domestic terrorists—claims Garland roundly denied. “I did not issue any memorandum directing the investigation of parents who are concerned about their children,” he told the committee.

Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona

Jordan subpoenaed Cardona as part of the same investigation of the DOJ’s involvement with local school boards. The subcommittee alleged that the secretary solicited the memo from the National School Boards Association. (Cardona’s spokeswoman told the Washington Post that did not happen.)

Former NSBA Execs Chip Slaven & Viola Garcia

Jordan’s subcommittee claims that Slaven and Garcia “directed the FBI to establish a ‘threat tag’ to investigate Americans.” That’s because Slaven was interim executive director of NSBA at the time and was responsible for sending Biden the letter requesting support for school officials and board members. Garcia co-signed the letter as NSBA’s president and a member of a Texas school board....>

<...Former Department of Homeland Security Executive Nina Jankowicz

Jankowicz is the former executive director of the DHS’s now-disbanded Disinformation Governance Board, which was tasked with developing recommendations to stop the flow of disinformation by China, Russia and violent domestic extremists.

The subcommittee argues she played a role in censoring conservatives, which she pushed back on by saying on Twitter it was a “working group meant to address disinformation that endangered Americans’ safety.”

FBI Director Christopher Wray

Jordan wants Wray to answer questions about the FBI’s efforts to investigate white supremacists’ interactions with Catholic churches in Richmond, Virginia. Jordan accused the agency of undertaking “domestic violent extremism investigations against Catholic Americans.”

The inquiry is inspired by an internal memo leaked by former FBI agent Kyle Seraphin, detailing a plan to monitor what the agency believed was a “growing overlap” between “radical-traditionalist Catholics” and the far-right white nationalist movement. The memo also included a list of Catholic organizations flagged as hate groups. Upon learning about the memo’s existence, the FBI confirmed it was taken down from its system and a review of the document was initiated. Wray said that the FBI doesn’t target people over their religious beliefs.

FTC Chair Lina Khan

Jordan wants Khan to appear before the subcommittee to discuss the FTC’s probe into Twitter after Elon Musk took over the company. Jordan alleges that the FTC “harassed Twitter in the wake of Mr. Musk’s acquisition” and made “inappropriate and burdensome” demands of the social media company.

Khan has said that FTC investigations are confidential and that her agency “will continue to faithfully discharge our statutory obligations and enforce the law without fear or favor.”>

<Famous gun-loving soon-to-be grandma Lauren Boebert at 36, seems to enjoy sending Twitter into meltdown.

Boebert, of Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District, tweeted a picture of Drew Barrymore, which confused many, but not as much as her previous tweet, which said, “The U.S. Constitution was not written as a suggestion.”

Two years ago, a former gun-themed restaurant owner tweeted, “Protecting and defending the Constitution doesn’t mean trying to rewrite the parts you don’t like.”

In February, she infamously said, “The Second Amendment is absolute, and it’s here to stay. A recent report states that Americans own 46 percent of the world’s guns. I think we need to get our numbers up, boys and girls.”

Boebert Complained About Church and State

During a Sunday service, Boebert said, “The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church. That is not how our Founding Fathers intended it.”

She continued:

“I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk that’s not in the Constitution. It was in a stinking letter, and it means nothing like what they say it does.”

It is hard to understand which church is “the church” for Boebert, but the main issue would be respecting the First Amendment.

It clearly states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

The U.S. Constitution was modified 27 times. This amused Twitter users, as one person said, “You understand what amendments are? Besides, you don’t abide by the Constitution.”

Another shared, “If that’s the case, resign immediately.” The same person attached a document from the Constitution. It says a person cannot be in office if they rebel against it.

The 14th Amendment

More people echoed this tweet, with one saying, “Sweet. Now read the 14th.”

Another shared, “Finally, you read it. Now honor the Fourteenth Amendment and resign immediately. 147 Republicans must be expelled or resign for their role in Trump’s insurrection.”

One of the most retweeted comments read, “Then why are you allowed to vote? It’s almost like it can be amended or something…but sure…it was a good try…”

And this person explained to her the winning tweet, “You want to go back to what the founding fathers originally wrote? Ok, you belong barefoot and pregnant in a kitchen taking care of your husband’s home. You’re no longer allowed to hold any position in Congress. You can not vote and are no longer allowed to have a bank account.”

Others Wanted To Talk More About Her Life

One Twitter user said, “Neither was “don’t expose yourself to minors in public” or “don’t impregnate your fifteen-year-old girlfriend” yet here we are.”

Another shared, “It doesn’t start with or end with the Second Amendment.”

Someone asked, “So why are you wilfully ignoring every other amendment except the 2nd?”

Boebert continued by talking about liberal women and did not disappoint.>

<Emmanuel Macron has just reminded us why we voted to leave the EU. On his way back from meeting Xi Jinping in Beijing, the diminutive énarque declared that Brussels should stop following the American line on Taiwan. Rather than behaving as a vassal, Macron told Les Echos, the EU should establish itself as the world’s troisième pôle.

It was a revealing choice of phrase. As a matter of geographical fact, there can be only two poles. Most Britons take it for granted that, if it comes to a choice between democratic America and autocratic China, we stand with America. Whatever our differences, we are united by our attachment to human rights, accountable government and the rule of law. Fracturing the free world for the sake of making some point about Europe’s “strategic autonomy” strikes us as vain, self-indulgent and dangerous.

France’s president sees things very differently. “As Europeans, our chief concern is unity,” he asserts loftily. “The Chinese have the same concern; and Taiwan, from their point of view, is a component part.”

This is an irresponsible thing to say at any time. But to pronounce those words even as Red Chinese forces were sealing Taiwan off, even as Xi Jinping was telling his troops to prepare for “real combat”, is downright incendiary.

If nothing else, Macron has demonstrated beyond doubt that Australia was right to ditch its order for French nuclear submarines and form the Aukus alliance. Australia, which China subjected to a range of harsh economic sanctions after it called for an investigation into the origins of Covid, needs dependable allies.

It might be argued, in Macron’s defence, that he is playing good cop to America’s bad cop, aiming to draw Xi into a more helpful position vis-à-vis Russia. In his book Overreach, Owen Matthews suggests that back channels between France and China were employed to agree parameters for the Ukraine conflict. For example, the reversal of the decision to send Polish aircraft to Kyiv in the early days of the war was supposedly part of a Chinese-brokered deal under which Russia agreed, in return, not to use tactical nuclear weapons.

It is not wrong in principle for Macron to talk to nasty regimes. But it is wrong – morally, intellectually and strategically – to choose this moment to throw Taiwan under the bus. Macron risks repeating the mistake he made when he danced attendance on Putin in the run-up to the invasion of Ukraine. Dictators are very good at manipulating the vanity of elected politicians, and Xi shows no sign of shifting his stance in response to Macron’s appeals.

Let’s not lose sight of what China is doing. We in the West might appreciate Taiwan’s embrace of political pluralism, but Beijing’s gerontocrats hate it. A free China on their doorstep, a China that shares their language and culture, but rejects their totalitarianism, undermines their legitimacy. If liberal democracy works in Taiwan, it can hardly be said to be a Western perversion, incompatible with Confucian culture. Taiwan, after all, is the home not only of Confucian culture, but of the Confucian family, whose head, the 79th direct-line descendant of the sage, is one of its leading citizens.

Since the 1990s, Taiwan has become an open society in which everyone is equal before the law. As it has become freer, it has become richer. Of course it has: security of contract encourages investment and innovation. For Beijing’s Leninist leaders, Taiwan’s prosperity is not just an insult, it is a menace. Their authority rests on the idea that collectivism is both more authentically Chinese and more efficient than decadent American liberalism. Taiwan makes a nonsense of that claim.

You could argue that none of this has anything to do with us. We might sympathise with the Taiwanese, but why should we be drawn into a quarrel with a nuclear-armed superpower on their behalf?

That question goes to the root of the difference between the EU’s foreign policy and the Anglosphere’s. To put it at its simplest, the EU tends to emphasise stability over liberty, while the Anglosphere tends to do the reverse.

Think of all the issues, over the years, where Washington and Brussels have fallen out: sanctions on Cuba; the Iran nuclear deal; the campaign against Saddam Hussein; support for Israel. Again and again, we see the US (often backed by the other English-speaking democracies) ready to confront illiberal regimes, while the EU prefers to hold its nose and deal with them.....>

<....It shouldn’t surprise us. The US was born in a popular revolt against a remote monarchy. Democracy is in its DNA. The EU, by contrast, was born in revulsion against the Second World War and the plebiscitary democracy that had preceded it. Its structures were deliberately designed to constrain populism, to ensure that public opinion would be moderated by a caste of unelected bureaucrats.

When he visits Beijing, a Brussels mandarin feels quite at home. Here, too, is a system run by clever men (and some clever women) who owe their positions not to any flummery involving ballot boxes, but to exams. China’s yearning for order and stability, its fondness for five-year plans, its desire, as Macron reminds us, for political unity – all these things are comfortingly familiar.

As for the notion of a European “third way” or “special path”, it is by no means new. It traces its origins back to the Second World War, when pro-Axis governments portrayed Europe as an oasis of civilisation between, on the one hand, the barbarism of Anglo-Saxon jungle capitalism and, on the other, the tyranny of Soviet communism. Typical is a Vichyite image from 1942, which shows France, Germany, Italy and others as chicks, huddled safely under the wings of a hen labelled Notre Mère l’Europe, while neutral Sweden and Switzerland look on, tempted, and Britain totters off grumpily into an American trap.

Obviously, modern European democracies are nothing like those quisling regimes. Their attachment to the rule of law is not in doubt. My point is simply that Britain has always been an outlier in its readiness to identify with the other English-speaking nations. Successive French leaders have supported European integration precisely because they see it as a counterweight to the United States.

And not just French leaders. Charles Michel, the president of the European Council (one of the EU’s seven presidents), tells us that many of the EU’s heads of government “think like Emmanuel Macron”. The Poles and the Balts might not like it, but the EU as a whole is moving towards “strategic autonomy”.

Macron reminded Les Echos that that project has advanced enormously over the past five years, with common EU policies on telephone components, defence procurement, hydrogen, raw materials and much else. “We’ve won the battle in Gramscian terms, if I can put it that way.”

Indeed so. Our own debate remains weirdly stuck in 2016. British commentators who profess to love Brussels show remarkably little curiosity about what is going on there. In the years since our referendum, the EU has continued to integrate, notably in the fields of taxation, defence and industrial policy. Macron boasts that Brussels is putting together its own version of America’s disastrous Inflation Reduction Act – a protectionist racket, which freezes out foreign competition in the name of environmentalism. This was precisely the kind of fortress Europe thinking that drove many of us to vote Leave.

Let me put it at its starkest. For more than a decade, authoritarianism has been advancing globally – a reversal of the pattern of the previous 70 years. Leading that authoritarian advance is China, which has fused spyware, facial-recognition technology and geolocation to create a terrifying panopticon state.

As good Leninists, Chinese leaders want to export their system, drawing poorer Asian and African states into a network of debt and dependency, building anti-Western alliances.

“There are changes happening, the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years,” Xi Jinping told Putin last month. “We are driving those changes.”

Almost every contiguous country, from India to Vietnam, has felt the weight of Chinese expansionism. But the chief target is Taiwan, whose assimilation would be a hammer blow to freedom, more devastating than anything since the crushing of the Warsaw rising in 1944.

Euro-integrationists might see all this as secondary. They might be more interested in selling Volkswagens to Shanghai, thumbing their noses at America or integrating their foreign policy as an end in itself. But we, as a country, must hold ourselves to a higher standard.>

<The $1.6bn lawsuit brought by voting company Dominion against Fox News has done more than threaten the rightwing channel with a historic financial penalty.

In recent weeks Fox News has also found itself thoroughly, and publicly, embarrassed, as internal messages have revealed not just the extent to which the organization attempted to ignore the actual news in its coverage of the 2020 election, but also the contempt many people within the organization have for Fox News viewers.

But whether Fox News wins or loses the defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion – a court hearing is set for 21 March, and a trial is scheduled to start on 17 April – more suffering is likely to come, on multiple fronts.

There’s some evidence that Fox News’s legendary hold over the Republican party is on the wane, and even speculation that the Murdoch family’s position atop the Fox conglomerate could be at risk.

The channel, which was founded by Rupert Murdoch in 1996, has become arguably the most influential media operation in American political history, holding huge sway over the Republican party while maintaining a reputation as a news organization.

But the disclosures released as part of Dominion’s suit have put that balance at risk. Dominion lawyers allege Fox News went out of its way to prop up false allegations of fraud, in what appears to have been a concerted effort to prop up the Republican party at the expense of reporting facts.

Messages from the likes of Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, Fox News’s two biggest stars, showed that many within Fox News did not believe Donald Trump’s claims of election fraud in the 2020 election, even as people on the channel continued to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the result.

Rupert Murdoch himself, in a deposition as part of the lawsuit, admitted that several Fox News hosts, including Hannity and Jeanine Pirro, “were endorsing” the lie that the election was stolen from Trump, in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

“What we’ve seen is a keyhole view into how Fox operates,” said Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters, a watchdog group.

“What makes all of this so disturbing is that this is about power,” he said. “And Fox News at its core is actually a political operation that is designed to give power to the Murdochs.”

The exposure of Fox News’s internal workings will weaken its reputation as a news organization, Carusone said, and should the channel and its owner, Fox Corporation, lose the Dominion case, there could be immediate financial consequences.

“If they lose the case I think it’s going to be really significant. One, it makes shareholder litigation a certainty. Two, it puts Murdoch control of the company in jeopardy.”

Some law firms are already approaching Fox corporation shareholders about litigation.

At least four firms, including Kehoe, which has previously involved in a lawsuit against Bank of America, and Scott+Scott, which was part of a $310m settlement from Google’s parent company Alphabet in 2020, have made public appeals for shareholders to approach them to potentially sue Fox Corporation directors and officers for allegedly breaching “their fiduciary duties to Fox and its shareholders”.

Rupert Murdoch currently serves as chair of the Fox Corporation board, with his son Lachlan Murdoch as executive chair. Amid the current scandal, however, Carusone said it is possible there could be “a couple of runs at Murdoch control of the company” from aggrieved shareholders.

Fox News could also face problems when it comes to renewing its contracts with cable companies, Carusone said. Cable companies in the US pay individual channels, like Fox News, for the right to include them in their cable packages. Fox News is currently the second most expensive channel, behind ESPN.

Fox News has been able to demand such fees by touting its loyal audience. But messages released as part of the Dominion case have laid bare the contempt some at Fox News have for both their viewers and for Donald Trump, a hero to many in the Fox News audience.

“Like negotiating with terrorists,” Alex Pfeiffer, then a producer on Tucker Carlson’s nightly show, said of the line Fox News had to tread between reporting the news and feeding its audience the conspiracy theories they crave.

“But especially dumb ones. Cousin-f***ing types, not Saudi royalty.”

In January 2021, in the lead up to the January 6 insurrection, Carlson texted a colleague expressing his views on Trump.

“I hate him passionately,” Carlson said. In another text Fox News’s most-watched host added: “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait.”...>

<....Given Fox News audience has a long-standing paranoia that it is being talked down to and misled by “media elites”, could these disclosures fracture the relationship between the channel and its viewers?

“Potentially,” said Nicole Hemmer, a political historian at Vanderbilt University and author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics.

“Because first of all media consumers have so many more options now than they used to. They have Fox News, of course, but they can maybe tab over to Fox News to watch Tucker Carlson and then they can move over to Newsmax to watch their offerings. There are all sorts of online streaming outlets, podcasts, all kinds of things.”

Hemmer added: “And there will be other conservative media outlets that will continuously remind their audiences that Fox News hosts have said this about them, and [allege] that Fox News is just another part of the corporate elite media that doesn’t like you.”

Fox News has weathered upsetting its audience before, however. After the channel – correctly – called Arizona for Joe Biden in the 2020 election, there was an anti-Fox News movement among the far right which saw Newsmax and One America News, two more extreme channels, drag viewers away from Fox News.

But since then, Newsmax and OAN have gone into decline, and viewers have returned to Fox News, tempted by conspiracy theory-laden offerings like Carlson’s widely condemned Patriot Purge documentary on the Capitol insurrection.

“Fox News has really leaned into anti-Biden, pro-Trumpism, even sort of occasionally pro-insurrection messaging, and that has helped to bind that audience back,” Hemmer said.

Hemmer said a larger consequence could be a loss of Fox News’s political influence.

“One of the big things that we’ve learned about Fox News is that the tension that it has embodied from its very earliest days of both wanting to be respected as a news organization, and also serving the conservative movement in the United States, that tension has more or less been resolved in favor of serving the conservative movement,” she said.

“It’s not going to have that same agenda-setting power, because it’s just not going to be treated as a serious news outlet by other news organizations.”

Fox News, meanwhile, has accused Dominion of attempting to “publicly smear Fox for covering and commenting on allegations by a sitting president of the United States”.

“Fox News Media has increased its investment in journalism by more than 50%, further expanding our newsgathering footprint both domestically and abroad while providing state-of-the-art resources to enhance our coverage,” Fox News and Fox Corporation said in a statement.

“We are incredibly proud of our team of journalists who continue to deliver breaking news from around the world and will continue to fight for the preservation of the first amendment as Dominion attempts to suppress basic rights protected by our constitution.”

Eric Deggans, a TV critic for NPR and author of Race-Baiter: How the Media Wields Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation, said a pressing issue for Fox is that a win for Dominion would open the door for other lawsuits.

“Looking at their quarterly reports, $1.6bn is close to the revenue they take in in a quarter. So even a judgment that large wouldn’t necessarily be a death blow for the company.

“But the risk they run is that if they lose the case in open court, then there’s going to be other voting machine systems lined up behind Dominion to sue them and other people and institutions lined up behind to sue them. Because Dominion is not the only company or individual that Fox has done this to.”

Smartmatic has already filed a $2.7bn defamation lawsuit against Fox News, the Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, the former business anchor Lou Dobbs and Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and earlier this month the New York state supreme court allowed it to proceed.

The texts and emails exposed so far have shown the conflict within Fox News between the commentary wing of Carlson and Hannity and the alleged straight news reporters who provide some of Fox News’s coverage. Irrespective of Fox’s financial woes, Deggans said that battle will be something to watch in the coming months.

“What’s obvious from the evidence that’s made it to the public sphere is that [Fox News’s] ratings success is tied up in pandering to the conspiracy theories that its audience believes,” Deggans said.

“It already was riding this fine line between trying to remain reality-based enough that it would be considered a news organization, and it could still have a reporter in the White House press corps and have access to all the protections and the access that mainstream journalists have, but also cultivate this audience by presenting these outlandish conspiracy theories as fact.

<Parents in Naples, Florida are calling foul after a teacher at their children's school showed their class a video that they are decrying as propaganda for the Confederacy.

Local news station NBC 2 reports that an unidentified teacher at the Manatee Middle School is under investigation for showing students a video that gushes about the "valiant, brave fight and the countless sacrifices by our men and women during that known as the Civil War."

What's more, the video rebrands the American Civil War as "the War To Prevent Southern Independence," which is a decidedly pro-Confederacy framing for a conflict that centered on Southern states' attempts to preserve the practice of slavery.

“To me, it looks like straight out of a Confederate sympathizer playbook,” local parent Annie O’Donnell told NBC 2.

“It was very biased seeming,” local parent Casey Smith told NBC 2 about the video. “The confederacy, as far as I’m concerned, has always been a stain on American history.”

Collier County Public Schools emphasized that the pro-Confederacy video is not part of its official curriculum, although the state of Florida does officially recognize April as Confederate History Month.>

<Republican lawmakers are making it harder for students to cast ballots where they attend school, after the GOP suffered stinging recent electoral losses largely due to a historic surge in turnout from younger voters backing Democrats.

A new law in Idaho specifically bars the use of student identification cards to vote, while a change in Ohio law means students will no longer be able to use tuition or college housing receipts as a form of voter ID, long a popular option for students without state driver’s licenses.

Similar legislation has been introduced in at least 11 other states this year, including the presidential battlegrounds of Pennsylvania and Nevada, according to Voting Rights Lab. Other bills have also targeted student voters, such as one in Texas that would bar college campuses from serving as polling places.

Younger voter turnout surged in Wisconsin’s recent Supreme Court election — one that hinged on abortion rights — helping Democrats recapture the court majority. Former Republican Governor Scott Walker tweeted that “younger voters are the issue,” blaming “years of radical indoctrination” in schools and social media and calling for conservatives to come together to work harder to “counter liberal indoctrination to save America.”

Liz Azore, who has been tracking the bills for Voting Rights Lab, said that Republican lawmakers seem more interested in legislating on student voting than usual.

“There is a lot more energy on this issue than we’ve seen in the past,” she said.

The proposals from state Republicans come as young voters have become a key voting bloc for Democrats, who believe progressive stands on issues like climate change and student debt will keep those voters in their camp for years to come.

In Idaho, the number of 18- and 19-year-olds registered to vote jumped 81% from 2018 to 2022, the largest percentage increase in any state, according to CIRCLE.

And many of those new voters are choosing Democrats.

In November, voters between ages 18 and 29 backed Democratic House candidates by 28 percentage points, the second-largest margin in three decades and the strongest showing for Democrats among any age group, according to CIRCLE. Turnout among that age group is also at 30-year highs, hitting 27% in the 2022 election.

Danielle Deiseroth, interim executive director of the progressive think tank Data for Progress, said that polls show younger voters are focused on issues they believe affect them directly, like gun control and abortion rights.

“Young people are not voting because of ‘vibes,’” she said. “They are voting because they are paying attention to the issues.”

Polls show broad public support for voter ID laws, but lawmakers have long sparred over whether student IDs, which are not government-issued, should count. In addition to Idaho’s ban, five states bar their use for voting. And no student IDs currently meet the requirements to be used in Arizona. Iowa and Utah only allow them when paired with other documentation.

Idaho state Representative Tina Lambert, who introduced the new ban, said it was necessary to stop students from neighboring states from voting twice, although she did not cite any evidence of that happening....>

<....“Some are going to say that this bill will prevent young people from voting,” she said in a speech on the state House floor. “That is certainly not the goal. The goal is simply to ensure that only qualified people are voting in Idaho elections.”

March for Our Lives Idaho, a student-led advocacy group in support of gun control, sued over the law in federal court, calling it a “surgical attack on Idaho’s young voters” in response to growing turnout. Co-director Amaia Clayton, a high school senior, said that the law is “hypocritical” because the state allows gun permits to be used as voter ID.

The Ohio law barred student IDs as well as a more common form of voter ID used by college students: tuition receipts, bank statements and utility bills which have a student’s campus address on them.

Rob Nichols, a spokesman for the Ohio secretary of state, said that college students are now able to get a free state identification card from the Department of Motor Vehicles to vote in person, or they can vote by mail, which does not require photo ID.

Mia Lewis, associate director of the voting rights organization Common Cause Ohio, questioned why the change was needed.

“Our secretary of state has said for years that Ohio runs model elections, setting a standard for the entire country, and yet suddenly there’s a desire to change them,” she said. “It’s perfectly legitimate to ask what’s driving these sudden changes.”>

<A top Republican donor said he won’t back a US presidential bid by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis because of his stance on social issues, the Financial Times reported.

Thomas Peterffy, billionaire chairman of Interactive Brokers, said he and some of his friends will put any financial support on hold because of the governor’s positions on abortions and book bans.

“We are waiting to see who among the primary candidates is most likely to be able to win the general, and then put all of our firepower behind them,” Peterffy told the FT.

Peterffy didn’t immediately respond to a request from Bloomberg for comment.

DeSantis has been laying the groundwork to run against former President Donald Trump in the 2024 primary but hasn’t formally announced plans to run.

Peterffy previously said he wouldn’t support Trump financially in this election after backing him in 2020, alongside other prominent donors like Citadel’s Ken Griffin and Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman.

Recent polling shows DeSantis far behind Trump in voter popularity, with the gap widening since the former president’s indictment in New York this month. Pro-DeSantis super-PAC Never Back Down is to spend at least a half million dollars to roll out its first national ad next week, according to AdImpact, an ad-tracking firm.

Nikki Haley, Trump’s ambassador the [sic] United Nations, former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, Ohio entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and Michigan businessman Perry Johnson have all entered the 2024 Republican race. Among other possible 2024 GOP contenders are Mike Pence, Trump’s vice president, and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, who recently announced a presidential exploratory committee. Former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said this week he won’t run.>

<Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas reported income from a real estate firm founded by his wife and her family, even after the company ceased to exist, the Washington Post said.

The Nebraska real estate firm, Ginger Ltd. Partnership, was founded in the 1980s and was shut down in 2006, the newspaper reported, citing state incorporation records. A separate firm, Ginger Holdings LLC, was created to assume control of the shuttered company’s land-leasing business, according to the report.

Thomas has continued to report income from the defunct company without mentioning the newer firm on forms, including between $50,000 and $100,000 annually in recent years, the Post said.

The misstatement follows reports by ProPublica this month that Thomas and his wife, Virginia, accepted vacations and flights for years from Harlan Crow, a wealthy real estate developer and Republican donor. The media outlet also reported that the justice and his relatives sold three Georgia properties that include Thomas’s boyhood home to Crow in 2014.

Thomas and his wife, also known as Ginni, didn’t respond to requests from the Post for comment. The justice has previously defended himself, saying he’d been told he didn’t have to report the trips.>

<Modern players certainly have a huge advantage in opening preparation using databases, but they're in no way superior in the middle or endgames. The legends could think for themselves, plan accurately and proceed....>

We should, of course, heed these words of <life700player>, who has greater erudition than those champions rolled into one.

What this fool ignores, as have others who actually understand a thing or three, is that today's greats built on the wisdom of the past.

<....25...c6?, 31.f4, 4.h3? 12.a3, 23...f6?!, 28...g5 was needed, 12...h6?!, and watch that g-pawn go pretty much sums up this 2023 WC crap....>

You <fredthepuke>, have presumed to lecture me on chess matters, whilst piously proclaiming that I have no right whatever to say anything because I am no longer active.

You want to comment in halfway intelligent fashion, shut your f***ing pie hole and learn from your betters--of whom there are only too many, <fredthejackal>.

<....Modern players just don't understand pawn play nor have the patience of the battle-hardened legends. Nepomniachtchi has a terrible habit of throwing pawns forward seeking an initiative, but it was proper in game 5....>

Way to contradict yourself; huff too much meth before the game, <boy>?

<....Nepomniachtchi will be a one-and-done champion. Compare him to Veselin Topalov, not the patient, battle-hardened legends who understood the game....>

Nepo has not yet won the title, or has that escaped your notice, you nescient twat? A score of 3-all does not equate to either player being cold for the title.

<....(Nepo is) no Boris Spassky.>

<If Cruella de Vil, the evil, dog-fur-coat-craving heiress in the novel “The Hundred and One Dalmatians,” hadn’t been featured in a Disney movie, she’d likely be a hero to present-day Republicans.

They seem to have a thing for villains. The two front-runners for the GOP presidential nomination are Donald Trump – an election-denying, insult-hurling and thoroughly indicted former president – and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis – a bully whose primary targets include teachers, LGBTQ youth and, as he clearly demonstrated late last week by signing a draconian six-week abortion ban, women who want control over their own bodies.

But alas, Cruella can’t join the fold of favored fiends. The Disney connection dooms her. That company, according to DeSantis and other Republicans, is “woke.” And woke, you see, is evil.

It's confusing, but in today's GOP, 'bad' is 'good'

I can already hear your confusion. Aren’t I premising this column on the idea that Republicans are embracing villains? And if so, shouldn’t evil actually be good?

It’s complicated. Someone “bad” is only “good” when that person fits perfectly, like a laser-cut jigsaw piece, into the puzzle that is the right-wing ecosystem.

For example, a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman, Jack Teixeira, was arrested last week and charged with leaking classified military documents online. In normal America, this would be considered “bad.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene gives suspected classified document leaker Jack Teixeira a big ol' hug

Enter one Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is the face of House Republicans, whether they like it or not. After the suspect's arrest, she tweeted: “Jake Teixeira is white, male, christian, and antiwar. That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime. And he told the truth about troops being on the ground in Ukraine and a lot more. Ask yourself who is the real enemy?”

I did ask myself who the real enemy is – in fact I asked myself several times, just to be sure – and the answer always came up: the guy charged with an array of crimes relating to the leaking of classified documents.

But again, that’s in normal America. In much of right-wing-echo-chamber America, however, the alleged actions Teixeira took were embraced. He fits right into the puzzle, in part because, as Greene noted, he’s “white, male, christian” and his case can be twisted into a grievance against the Biden administration. Welcome home, Jack.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott wants to pardon a convicted murderer

In Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott announced he’s going to do all he can to pardon Daniel Perry, an Army sergeant who was found guilty this month of murdering a Black Lives Matter protester in 2020. This came after Fox News’ Tucker Carlson hollered about Perry’s conviction, calling it “a legal atrocity.”

In the right-wing fever swamps, anyone associated with Black Lives Matter is always the bad guy. And that old Republican tough-on-crime idea? That only applies if the crime fits the puzzle, and this one clearly didn’t.

Oops! Turns out the convicted murderer also sent a bunch of racist messages

But it gets worse. Shortly after Abbott went to bat for the convicted murderer, more court documents from the case were unsealed. They included an array of private messages from Perry that are wildly racist. So now Abbott and Carlson and all who’ve tried to make Perry a cause célèbre on the right have their arms around a racist murderer. Bad is good, good is bad. What a world.....>

<....Speaking of crimes and unsavory characters, former President Trump has not only been indicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, he’s facing an array of other investigations ranging from election interference to a possible violation of the Espionage Act.

He’ll also go on trial later this month in a civil lawsuit alleging defamation and sexual assault. That all sounds downright villainous, but many Republicans still love him, and he remains the favorite to win the party’s 2024 presidential nomination.

Maybe it’s because he also loves bad guys.

Donald Trump clearly has a thing for tyrants

In a recent interview with Carlson on Fox News, Trump described Russian President Vladimir Putin as “top of the line.”

Of Chinese President Xi Jinping, Trump said that he “is a brilliant man. If you went all over Hollywood to look for somebody to play the role of President Xi, you couldn’t find – there’s nobody like that. The look, the brain, the whole thing.”

The brutal North Korean dictator? Trump said: “Kim Jong Un is smart too. You know, when you come out and as a young man at 24, 23, even though he sort of inherits it, most people when they inherit, they lose it. And that’s easy stuff. He took over a country, a very smart people, very, very energetic people, very tough people at a very young age. And he has total dominate [sic] control. That’s not easy.”

Have Republicans met a tyrant they don’t like in recent years? (I welcome your emails saying “BIDEN IS A TYRANT AND YOUR AN IDIOT!!!” Thank you for proving my point.)

And lest we forget, the 'heroes' who attacked the U.S. Capitol

Don’t forget all the violent MAGA mopes in prison for attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Carlson, Greene, Trump and other notable noisemakers routinely frame them as patriotic victims of an unjust system.

So the ones who beat up all the police officers and expressed a pressing desire to hang Vice President Mike Pence are now the good guys if you’re part of the pro-villain wing of the Republican Party.

It’s a strange time to be alive. I’m telling you, if Cruella hadn’t been in that Disney flick, she’d probably be a GOP-vice-presidential-candidate-in-waiting, making a killing selling faux-dog-fur coats at MAGA rallies.>

<AOC Needs to GO: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is a Marxist revolutionary masquerading as a “defender” of “our democracy”.

Of course, AOC’s definition of “democracy” is not inclusive at all. It is highly restrictive. Democracy, according to AOC and her fellow Democrats, is reserved only for the anointed few who believe in the same insanity that she (and her donors) do.

That is why AOC’s recent tirades against the Supreme Court are so troubling.

Up until recently, AOC could be ignored as an ignorant backbencher in Congress who got the perks of having a safe seat in Congress with no real responsibility. Now, however, she has committee assignments. As her stature on the Hill grows, her media profile expands, and her deleterious impact on our society increases.

AOC is Getting More Powerful

AOC is already looking to run against Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) for the junior senator’s seat in the next election cycle. Even if AOC ultimately buggers off from that approach, she is clearly going to continue being a one-woman wrecking crew for our national politics.

Take her stunning opposition to the recent Supreme Court rulings on abortion. Certainly, that is a Congresswoman’s right to express disagreement with members of another coequal branch of government. Although, she has taken it to the extreme. AOC is now demanding that both the Legislative Branch, and more importantly, the Executive Branch as led by President Joe Biden, simply ignore the Supreme Court rulings with which they disagree.

Of course, AOC has a disturbing double-standard on this issue. When it was former President Donald J. Trump was issuing executive orders limiting immigration, AOC and her gal pals on the Left were insisting that Trump be made to comport both with congressional as well as Supreme Court standards and rulings.

To be fair, at the time, she was correct. No president may issue executive orders or act outside of the written law. What’s more, presidents—and congress—are required to follow Supreme Court rulings after they’ve been handed down.

It’s Not Fascism When AOC Does It

Flash forward to three years after Trump is out of office and it’s the Democrats who have the reins of power (at least in the Executive Branch) and AOC is now telling her party to do precisely what she was arguing against the GOP doing when they were in charge. I am not writing this point out the hypocrisy of AOC and the Left.

That’s a tired old trope on the Right and doesn’t get anyone, anywhere. Everyone fundamentally knows that the road to power is paved by hypocrisy and betrayal. The Democrats—particularly ideological hacks, like AOC—take the cake in the hypocrisy department.

The issue is that AOC is likely in violation of Congressional standards. Even though a Congresswoman cannot be impeached as a president or even a judge can be, they can be removed from office by a two-thirds vote in the House of Representatives.

Making AOC Pay

It is unlikely that the GOP, despite having control over the House, has the votes to push AOC out. But they should still make a big spectacle about her continual violations of Congressional standards. What’s more, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) should immediately remove AOC from any of her committee assignments, relegating her to the backbench where she belongs.

It is not acceptable for elected members of the Legislative Branch to openly call both for her branch as well as the Executive Branch to flout the rulings of the United States Supreme Court, the hallmark of the Judicial Branch. We’ve already struggled with more than a century’s worth of excesses from the Executive Branch and a consistently weak Legislative Branch.

The last thing we need now is a war upon the third branch, the Judicial, in which Leftist partisans in the other two branches simply cherry-pick which rulings they will follow based on their short-sighted ideological preferences.

Especially when they will have set a new precedent which the other side will definitely follow and abuse as much as the Left intends to. AOC is proving to be far too dangerous our [sic] actual representative democracy by abusing her position to influence people into flouting our Constitutional norms.

Only the GOP-controlled House can punish her and put her in her place. They cannot abide for the sickening abuses she and her Left-wing colleagues are calling for. Not if we plan to save our democracy. >