GOP Judges Strike Down Far-Right Religious Liberty Training Punishment

Lawyers representing Southwest Airlines no longer have to undergo “religious liberty training” from a far-right Christian hate group, a federal appeals court ruled Friday, overturning a ruling from August. 

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that the training would likely violate the lawyers’ constitutional rights and exceed the court’s authority. Three Republican judges sat on the panel making the decision, two of whom were appointed by Donald Trump.

Last year, a federal judge in Texas appointed by Trump ordered three senior lawyers for the airline to take eight hours of training from the Alliance Defending Freedom as part of sanctions resulting from a religious discrimination lawsuit brought by a former flight attendant.

The attendant, Charlene Carter, sued Southwest for firing her in 2017 after she sent anti-abortion messages to her union’s former president. Carter argued she had been discriminated against based on her religious beliefs, and U.S. District Judge Brantley Starr ruled in her favor, ordering she be reinstated. Starr also ordered Southwest to issue a statement to its employees saying that the airline “may not” engage in religious discrimination against them.

When Southwest said that it “does not” do so, Carter demanded additional sanctions against the company, to which Starr responded by requiring the religious liberty training. Why Starr brought in the ADF is unclear, as they weren’t representing Carter and had no involvement in the case whatsoever.

The Alliance Defending Freedom is designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for advocating laws promoting discrimination against LBGTQ people. ADF recently represented the plaintiff in the Supreme Court case 303 Creative v. Elenis, where a web designer sued to have the right to refuse services to LGBTQ people based on an entirely fabricated premise. The group has also fought against reproductive rights, helping to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Charlatan Comer was caught yet again doing something he’s criticized Biden for. In a desperate attempt to impeach Biden, the House Oversight chair has long accused Biden of using pseudonymous emails to dodge public records and help obscure his involvement in his messy son’s chaos. In a pristine example of “every accusation is a confession” theory, it turns out Comer did exactly that.

While serving as Kentucky’s commissioner of agriculture, Comer sent numerous emails using pseudonyms. Two Kentucky government email accounts named for Comer’s son, Harlan—who at the time was just 7 years old—were uncovered by The Daily Beast during a records request related to Comer’s 2014 marijuana mishap exposed earlier this week.

One email to an aide with the Kentucky Department of Agriculture purportedly sent from the 7-year-old reads, “I’ll touch base with you today about Hemp. Some things have happened over night [sic] with respect to hemp so we may be growing it this year.” Though kids sometimes pick up odd hobbies, The New Republic was unable to find any evidence that Harlan was growing hemp in his early childhood, let alone sending emails to state agencies.

Other emails were signed to “Jamie”—an incredibly uninventive pseudonym for someone who has gone by Jamie throughout his life—with an automated “Sent from my iPhone” signature. A spokesperson for Comer rebuffed queries into the emails, claiming all of Comer’s emails were “monitored and maintained” by staff, which naturally begs the question as to why staff for Comer were handling emails related to his private business dealings with a Chinese company.

“As the Commissioner of Agriculture, Congressman Comer’s email accounts were solely monitored and maintained by staff,” the unnamed spokesperson told The Daily Beast. “All communications are publicly available through the Kentucky Open Records Act.”

Given his lackluster aptitude for creativity, it’s no wonder Comer reached so close to home to find things to lob at Biden. If that’s the case, we can reasonably expect to hear Comer claim Biden abused his college girlfriend.

Not even California Representative Nancy Pelosi believes that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should address Congress.

Speaking to CNN on Friday, the former House speaker said that it was “wrong” to invite Netanyahu, and that she would “absolutely not” have invited him if she were still leading the chamber.

“Frankly, I didn’t approve of his being invited the last time, but the Speaker just on his own invited him without consulting the rest of the leadership,” Pelosi said, recalling when former House Speaker John Boehner called on Netanyahu to address Congress in 2015. “And he came, and he criticized President Obama for the masterful work that he had done with the nuclear agreement regarding Iran to stop them from developing a nuclear weapon.

“And I thought it was completely inappropriate,” she continued. “I feel very sad that he has been invited. But who knows, by then will he still be prime minister?”

“Everything I read is they’re unhappy about this, they’re unhappy about that,” Pelosi said, referring to Benny Gantz, the Israeli minister without portfolio who has given Netanyahu an ultimatum: Adopt Gantz’s party’s objectives by Saturday or witness the National Unity Party’s exit from government. “I wish that he would be a statesman and do what is right for Israel.”

Pelosi then quickly rotated through her usual positions on the conflict: advocating for a two-state solution, decrying Hamas as a “terrorist organization” that is “dedicated to the destruction of Israel,” and lamenting that the hostages are not free and that the “people of Gaza are suffering.”

“We need to help them and not have him stand in the way of that for such a long time,” Pelosi said. “I think it’s going to invite more of what we have seen in terms of discontent among our own people about what’s happening there.”

Pelosi’s comments are a surprising shift for the California Democrat, who has been unyielding in her support for Israel. In January, she came under fire for accusing pro-Palestine protesters of having ties to Russia and the Kremlin.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas amended his previous financial disclosures Friday, retroactively acknowledging that the lavish trips he had taken in 2019 were financed by the Republican megadonor, billionaire real estate developer, and Nazi memorabilia collector Harlan Crow.

The expenses were first revealed last year in a series of investigations by ProPublica that found the conservative justice had been pocketing favors from Crow in a number of ways, including private school tuition for his nephew; the renovation of the home where his mother still lives; and undisclosed trips on the billionaire’s yacht, private jet, and at his private resort.

The annual financial disclosures are one of the few insights into the private lives of the nation’s highest judiciary. In his 2023 report, Thomas included an unusual addendum, defending his decision to accept luxurious gifts from Crow while admitting that he had “inadvertently omitted” details about the favors on his previous disclosures, blaming the leaked Roe v. Wade decision for his reasoning to avoid commercial air travel.

“Because of the increased security risk following the Dobbs opinion leak, the May flights were by private plane for official travel as filer’s security detail recommended noncommercial travel whenever possible,” Thomas wrote at the time.

The court, which had long avoided the kinds of formal ethics regulations imposed on lower courts due to its special constitutional status, implemented its first ethics code in November—in part to respond to public scrutiny over the undocumented gifts embraced by Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito, who failed to report a luxury fishing vacation to Alaska with hedge fund billionaire ​​Paul Singer in 2008.

A new analysis of Representative Nancy Mace’s finances reveals that the South Carolina Republican overcharged Congress thousands of dollars to cover housing expenses on her $1.6 million Washington, D.C., townhouse.

Mace was accused of “secretly fleecing taxpayers” in an ethics complaint filed earlier this week, alleging she sought higher monthly lodging reimbursements than what was actually warranted per her expenses.

A closer analysis of bills from her home—including Washington Gas, Pepco water, Xfinity internet, insurance, and taxes—indicates that Mace charged the government for more than $8,900 over what she was eligible for, reported Punchbowl News.

In a statement to Punchbowl News, Mace’s communications director Gabrielle Lipsky said that the representative’s office follows “all the rules for reimbursements” and “returned over $300,000 in taxpayer dollars from our office budget last year.”

Mace’s former staffers gladly dished the dirt on her, though, disclosing to The Washington Post last week that Mace repeatedly directed her team to file for reimbursements to the tune of $2,000 a month, despite being informed by people involved in her office finances that she could not justify claiming more than $1,726 a month. During some months of the year, she filed to be reimbursed upward of $3,000—nearly double what her team had calculated.

“Representative Mace has violated House Ethics Rules by repeatedly seeking reimbursement for lodging in excess of the actual monthly expense of maintaining her co-owned townhouse in  Washington, D.C., resulting in a misuse of taxpayer funds for purposes unrelated to her official duties,” read a copy of the ethics complaint.

Mace’s requests violated two key rules of a congressional reimbursement program, according to the complaint: Lawmakers cannot be repaid for interest or principal on their mortgage payments, and they cannot ask to be repaid for more than their actual expenses.

Donald Trump is in trouble in the United Kingdom for not paying the legal costs of the company owned by former MI6 spy Christopher Steele, after losing a lawsuit over Steele’s infamous Russia dossier.

According to a report from Sky News, Trump is in breach of a British High Court ruling in March that ordered him to pay 300,000 pounds (approximately $385,000), after he lost his lawsuit against against Orbis Business Intelligence, which in 2016 put together a dossier alleging that Trump and his close associates were compromised by Russian intelligence. The dossier included salacious details claiming that Trump had participated in sex parties in St. Petersburg, Russia, with the country’s intelligence allegedly possessing video of the now-convicted felon receiving “golden showers” from Russian sex workers. 

Trump denied all of the claims made in the dossier, which was compiled by Steele, and claimed in his lawsuit that he “suffered personal and reputational damage and distress,” particularly from the sex-related claims. In the end, he lost the trial and was ordered to reimburse Orbis for its legal fees.

On Friday morning, Steele pointed out that Trump hasn’t complied with the court order for two months, opening him up to legal enforcement if he travels to the U.K.

Trump has racked up several fines as a result of his legal issues since losing the 2020 presidential election. He had to pay a $175 million bond for his civil fraud case, reduced from $454 million after an appeal, while he tries to appeal the ruling. He owes writer E. Jean Carroll $88.3 million for sexually abusing and defaming her, and racked up $10,000 in fines after repeatedly violating a gag order in his hush-money trial.

As a result of his felony conviction in his hush-money trial, in which he still awaits sentencing, Trump is technically barred from traveling to 38 countries that don’t allow felons to cross their borders, including the U.K. Perhaps the British government can make an exception in its travel ban, if only to collect on his debt. Of course, Trump has a long history of not paying what he owes.

Team Trump boasted about people “braving” extreme heat in Arizona while waiting to watch Trump ramble incoherently at a campaign rally for over an hour on Thursday, making no mention that at least 11 people collapsed and were hospitalized for heat exhaustion.

“That’s an enthusiasm that Joe Biden will never see,” Trump’s newsletter proclaimed of the crowds stuck roasting on unshaded concrete. “That’s the enthusiasm Americans have to Make America Great Again!”

The intense loyalty to Trump from his supporters—largely elderly and more prone to heat stroke—is a disturbing example of how far his extremist base is willing to suffer just for a glimpse of their dear leader. Their queasy dedication speaks to the religious fervor cultivated by Trump who touts himself as a messiah who has come to save the masses from the satanic swamp, a Jesus preaching gobbledygook from the mountaintop of Dream City megachurch in Phoenix. On Friday, Trump boasted about a song that refers to him as “the chosen one”—words he has explicitly said in the past.

That Team Trump apparently took no measures to meet its base’s most basic human needs amid an anticipated high of 108 degrees on Thursday—neither handing out water nor setting up cooling tents in anticipation of the heat—and instead touted their suffering as “enthusiasm” speaks to the level of appreciation Trump has for those who support him, which is to say obviously none.

Byron Donalds just can’t escape his insane comment suggesting that Black Americans were better off during the Jim Crow era, a time period defined by laws institutionalizing racial segregation in the United States. It’s gotten so bad, he’s even getting grief about it from Fox News.

“During Jim Crow, the Black family was together,” Donalds said during an event earlier this week. “During Jim Crow, more Black people were not just conservative, because Black people have always been conservative-minded, but more Black people voted conservatively.” Ever since, he has continued to double down on this demented sentiment, despite drawing an insane amount of backlash.

Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer incredulously asked Donalds during an interview Friday about his belief that Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program in the 1960s, which expanded Social Security benefits and Medicare and raised the minimum wage, among other things, had “led African Americans down a worse road.”

“Let’s be clear, it’s not about belief—it’s the empirical fact,” Donalds said. “The marriage rate in Black America declined rapidly after the passage of a lot of the Great Society policies.”

MSNBC anchor Joy Reid also slammed Donalds for his ridiculous comment during an interview the night before and pushed him to get real about his assertion that the Jim Crow era had somehow been better for Black people. “Is there a specific period between 1867 and 1968 that you thought was this golden era for Black families or a time that was good for Black families?” Reid asked.

Donalds was incensed by the question and accused Reid of “gaslighting” him, because he’d never said it was the “golden age,” only better for marriage rates. In context, Donalds clearly hadn’t said it was just better for marriage rates—he’d said it was better for the conservative party.

Reid continued to lambaste Donalds’s longing for that era of American policies. “During Jim Crow, could your family have existed? You are in an interracial marriage, your wife is a white conservative activist,” she said. “Could your family have existed at all during Jim Crow?”

“No it could not, Joy, we all know that. But that’s why I am blessed to live in America today, as opposed to America during that time,” he said, insisting that it was important for Black men to be present fathers—somehow completely missing that his response indicates that Jim Crow wasn’t so great for Black people after all, a point Reid seized upon.

“What I am grateful for is that we do not live in the Jim Crow era and that fathers do not face the threat of lynching,” Reid replied. “And perhaps don’t bring up Jim Crow when you’re trying to make that example.”

Donald Trump signaled, and conservative lawmakers listened.

Speaking to The Meg Ellefson Show last week, Wisconsin Representative Derrick Van Orden accused Democrats, the justice system, and U.S. media of being in cahoots to prevent Trump from winning the presidency. He also insisted that anyone who respects the decision made by 12 jurors who convicted Trump are actually “fascists,” on a power trip akin to Adolf Hitler’s takeover of Germany, and claimed President Joe Biden’s “job” is to go back in time and change history “if it doesn’t reflect the current outlook that the regime wants.”

Referring to William Shirer’s book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Orden claimed that the similarities between the Democratic Party and the Nazi Party “cannot be denied at this point.”

“The Democrats are going to start shouting, saying this guy, ‘He’s a convicted felon. He’s a convicted felon,’” said Van Orden. “Every single person that was sentenced to decades in the gulag and died there, committed suicide there because it was so dreary, every single one of them was convicted by a court in the Soviet Union. All of them. And what the Biden administration and the leftists have done is they have essentially destroyed the confidence in the American judicial system for over half the country.”

And for Van Orden, any level of unity in accepting the conviction is akin to conspiracy.

“If you can’t look at the left-wing media … and see that they’re marching lockstep together and pushing a consistent message over all different forms of media, then you’re blind,” he added.

These new accusations against liberals belie the reality that some members of the far right have actually—albeit, some insisting playfully—proclaimed themselves as fascists. Trump himself has spoken at length on what he loved about Hitler, and the presumptive GOP presidential nominee’s political maneuverings are near identical to those of the most prominent fascist leaders of the twentieth century.

Van Orden’s heightened language also comes just a few short days after Trump increased his own use of fascist descriptors for the liberal party.

The Republican National Committee has decided to draft a 2024 party platform, and it’s hired a leader of the “Stop the Steal” election-denier movement to help.

On May 15, Ed Martin, a former chair of the Missouri Republican Party, was hired to serve as the ​​deputy policy director of the platform committee, reported NBC News. Martin is well known for supporting Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, even giving a speech in Washington, D.C., the day before the January 6 Capitol riots in 2021 to rally Trump’s supporters.

“No matter what happens tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after, we still need to be in the fight. There’s no summer soldiers and springtime patriots here. There’s the die-hard true Americans,” Martin said in that speech. “We start today, go through tomorrow and every day till we have a last breath and go home to the Lord because we will stop the steal.”

On January 6 itself, he was present on the Capitol grounds, posting on social media the entire time and claiming that the crowd was “rowdy” but otherwise fine, even after rioters had already breached the Capitol building.

“I’m at the Capitol right now,” Martin posted on Twitter. “Rowdy crowd but nothing out of hand. Ignore the #FakeNews.”

“Like Mardi Gras in DC today: love, faith and joy,” Martin tweeted minutes later.

Martin would later be subpoenaed by the House January 6 committee, which said it had evidence that he helped plan the rally preceding the riots and paid some of the costs for the rally’s vendors. Martin didn’t show up to a deposition with the committee, though. He later spread conspiracy theories about the riots, claiming that government operatives were responsible, and attended events with other election deniers such as Michael Flynn and Ali Alexander. 

The GOP is drafting a party platform for the first time in eight years, after deciding in 2020 that it would recycle 2016’s platform and “continue to enthusiastically support the president’s America-first agenda,” referring to Trump. Martin’s appointment suggests that 2024’s platform will include challenging the integrity of any election that Republicans lose. And he’s not the first election denier the RNC has hired since Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump took over as the committee’s co-chair. Lawyer Christina Bobb, who faces charges in Arizona for helping to overturn the state’s election results, was tapped to head the committee’s “election integrity” division.