Louisiana’s Ten Commandments Law Already on Its Way to Supreme Court

Last week, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signed into law a controversial bill requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public school classrooms. Shortly before, he told donors at a GOP event in Tennessee, “I’m going home to sign a bill that places the Ten Commandments in public classrooms. And I can’t wait to be sued.” Sure enough, Louisiana parents and a coalition of civil liberties organizations are granting him his wish.

The ACLU, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, along with the parents of children enrolled in Louisiana public schools, filed a lawsuit against the state for violating the religious freedom of students on Monday. The move was widely expected, not just by Landry and religious conservative pugilists, but also by a consensus of legal experts, who claim the law is unconstitutional. Supreme Court legal precedent is on their side; two previous attempts to mandate similar displays were struck down.

But Landry’s giddiness for the upcoming legal fight echoes the attitude of the bill’s co-author, Louisiana State Representative Lauren Ventrella, who, in the midst of a flailing attempt to defend the law on national television, revealed the Christian conservative strategy on which she and Landry will rely.

“Now it is a different bench” on the Supreme Court, Ventrella told CNN’s Abby Philip. With a 6–3 conservative majority—including religious fundamentalist Christians Amy Coney Barrett and Samuel Alito, and multiple justices who have shown a willingness to depart from precedent capriciously—advocates of the law are hoping to move the lawsuit through the courts until it finds a friendly reception at the Supreme Court.

In the meantime, though, they’ll continue to run roughshod over the First Amendment.

Judge Aileen Cannon was poised Monday to do Donald Trump yet another massive favor in his classified documents case, aiming to slow down proceedings and muddy the waters by raising concerns about special counsel Jack Smith’s spending.

Attorneys for the former president have continued to push the claim that Smith’s appointment was constitutionally invalid, and in a hearing Monday, they took aim at the budget for Smith’s investigation. Cannon, who has readily slowed Trump’s trial to a complete standstill, was happy to entertain the defense’s grievances.

Fresh off of his loss in Manhattan criminal court, Trump’s lawyer Emil Bove argued that the Department of Justice had violated the U.S. Consitution’s appropriations clause by improperly funding Smith’s office.

Trump’s defense lawyers had argued in a court filing Friday that Smith was not paid through the Justice Department but through an “off the books” fund reserved for “independent counsels,” which lack the necessary oversight. They alleged that Smith has access to a “permanent indefinite appropriation,” which is otherwise not available to a special counsel.

During Monday’s hearing, assistant special counsel James Pearce responded to the defense’s claims, arguing that the Justice Department could just as easily pay Smith’s bills out of their own pot.

But Cannon didn’t seem convinced. The Trump-appointed judge said that the seemingly “limitless” funding suggested a separation of powers issue, per Bove’s claim.

Cannon called the cost of Smith’s appointment a “significant” amount of money, according to The Washington Post, although it is likely only a small fraction of the Department of Justice’s whopping $40 billion annual budget.

Resolving whether Smith’s appointment is constitutional will only drag out Trump’s classified documents case, making it less likely with every passing day that he will face trial before the November election.

Cannon held a second hearing Monday afternoon over prosecutors’ request that a gag order be placed on the former president, preventing him from making unfounded claims against the FBI. Trump has insisted that federal agents intended to maim or even assassinate him while searching Mar-a-Lago, while in reality, they purposefully timed their search to occur when he was absent.

An RNC staffer is behind the viral doctored videos of Joe Biden appearing senile, a new report from The Daily Beast shows.

According to the Beast’s Jake Lahut, 31-year-old Jake Schneider, a former Trump campaign employee and former intern for Tea Party Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann, runs the popular RNC Research Twitter account, which has posted several videos of Biden appearing confused or freezing up. RNC Research has also promoted an edited video that suggests that the president pooped himself (it has since been debunked).

Sources close to the Trump campaign called Schneider “the tip of the spear” of the Republican effort to make Biden’s age a central issue of the election. And they’re not wrong. Schneider and RNC Research enjoy high levels of coordination with powerful right-wing media organizations smuggling the interests of the ruling class through seemingly neutral platforms: Sinclair Broadcast Group, the media company buying up local news affiliates and turning them into pro-Trump organs, has been blasting out syndicated news features on Biden’s age using RNC Research videos (including, in at least three articles, the claim that he pooped himself) to nearly 100 local news websites in the past month.

RNC Research’s skullduggery comes in the wake of the total remaking of the RNC in Trump’s image: Trump daughter-in-law Lara Trump and election-denier Michael Whatley were picked to helm the organization in March.

George Conway has issued a harsh wake-up call for MAGA supporters around the country: No one else in the entire world likes your candidate.

“Basically, the entire world makes fun of this man,” Conway said on the most recent episode of his podcast George Conway Explains It All.

“In MAGA Land, they don’t appreciate what a global, planetary joke he is to the world,” Conway continued in the Thursday episode, later posting the same quote on his social media. “They think of Donald Trump as this tough guy who scares everybody. He scares everybody the same way that a 5-year-old walking around on a roof holding a bomb might scare. But he’s, you know, he’s weak and pathetic and stupid.”

In another portion of the podcast, Conway claimed that Trump should make for an easy debate opponent for President Joe Biden to prepare for, claiming that Trump’s repetitive attacks are “not very good” and “usually in the same order.”

Political advisers and news outlets have scrambled to pinpoint Trump’s battle tactics for presidential debates since he first appeared as a legitimate candidate in 2016. The Atlantic argued that Trump relies heavily on a rhetorical approach called the Gish gallop, which they describe as a “torrent of incorrect, irrelevant, or idiotic arguments” in which one can bury their opponent. One political insider told Politico Magazine that Trump has “no strategy, just kill and eat.” And Vox created a seven-part taxonomy of Trump’s approach, observing that he “turns tough policy questions into simple stories,” filibusters until the clock runs out to avoid giving details, and leans on his poll numbers and meaningless, three-word slogans.

Conway is the ex-husband of former top Trump White House aide Kellyanne Conway, who reportedly still has the close ear and attention of the presumptive GOP presidential nominee—so much so that she’s been doing the legwork of weighing candidates for Trump’s vice president pick. The Conways split up in 2023 after spending the better part of the Trump administration sniping at each others’ political opinions in the public sphere.

A new report has found that Donald Trump’s spending habits as president led to him driving up the national debt twice as much as Biden.

An Axios analysis published Monday found that Trump added $8.4 trillion in borrowing, including $3.6 trillion in Covid-19 relief, citing the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. In contrast, Biden borrowed $4.3 trillion, with $2.1 trillion going to Covid relief.

Much of Trump’s non-pandemic debt was due to his 2017 tax cuts, which added $1.9 trillion of debt. His spending packages, passed with bipartisan support, added $2.1 trillion. Biden’s spending bills only added $1.4 trillion, along with $620 billion for his student debt plans and $520 billion supporting health care for veterans.

The analysis raises questions about how the November presidential election would affect fiscal policy. Trump’s tax policies are currently set to expire in 2025 but would add $4.6 trillion to the national debt over the next decade if they are fully extended. Neither Biden nor Trump have paid particular attention to the national debt in their presidential campaigns, but it has a major effect on the economy and government programs.

The GOP has long criticized the Democratic Party for a willingness to tax and spend, but the data shows that Biden has spent much less than Trump, even after factoring in Covid. Trump, who came into the White House touting his success in business, seems to have shown his ability to rack up debt and completely disregard older Republican ideas of fiscal responsibility.

But really, the difference between the two presidential candidates, and their political parties, can be traced back to the historically pivotal 2000 presidential election. Democrat Al Gore wanted to use the budget surplus at the time to pay down the national debt, while Republican George W. Bush wanted to enact a massive tax cut. In the end, Bush won, and he would not only enact the tax cut but rack up astronomical levels of debt by taking the United States into two wars with no tax increases.

Today, no Republican will entertain tackling the debt with tax increases, even on the rich, illustrating the choice Americans have this November about how the national debt will be handled. Bush and Trump have hopefully taught voters that businessmen don’t make for better, or even fiscally responsible, political leaders.