Dick Durbin’s Spineless Delay on Supreme Court Corruption

Illinois Senator Dick Durbin announced Thursday that the Senate Judiciary Committee plans to conduct a review of the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling, arguing that “Congress cannot turn a blind eye to it.” But the meeting won’t happen until September.

“During this upcoming hearing, we will examine the breadth of future misconduct that may be immunized from prosecution, consider the unprecedented nature of this immunity in American history, and discuss legislative solutions to the dangers of this decision,” Durbin, the committee chairman, said in a statement obtained by HuffPost.

“The Senate Judiciary Committee will not tolerate these justices cherry-picking their way through text and history to impose their own extreme vision of presidential power on the American people,” he said.

Details on the event are scant. The hearing does not yet have a specific date, and names of potential witnesses have not been revealed. It’s unclear what—if any—influence the September hearing will have on the judicial ruling, or if it will even happen in time to have any effect.

The announcement follows a groundswell of calls for increased checks and balances for the nation’s highest court, which has a history of ethics violations and has most recently made several dangerous rulings, stripping executive agencies of their authority and expanding the definition of presidential immunity. That new definition has effectively killed any criminal charges against Donald Trump related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, and for his involvement in stoking the January 6 attack his supporters led on the U.S. Capitol.

New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday introduced impeachment articles against Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, both of whom have a recorded affinity for accepting lavish gifts from Republican billionaires. The articles include counts for failing to disclose financial income and gifts, as well counts for refusing to recuse themselves from cases that concerned either their spouse’s legal or financial benefits or their own.

In an incredibly literal interpretation of “fake it till you make it,” several fake electors will serve as delegates at the Republican National Convention next week, CNN reported Thursday. The fake electors—some of whom currently face criminal charges for their efforts to upend the 2020 presidential election results in support of Donald Trump—will serve as delegates for their state as part of the formal nomination process to confirm Trump as the Republican nominee.

Arizona’s delegation includes three people charged for their participation in a fake elector scheme, including state Senator Jake Hoffman, who pleaded not guilty last month to several felony charges alleging his participation in a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results. Hoffman will serve on the Republican National Committee, which oversees the convention, alongside Georgia’s Amy Kremer, who helped organize the election-denialist rally at the Ellipse on January 6, 2021, ahead of the Capitol riot.

Michigan’s delegation includes four people facing charges, including fake electors Matthew DePerno and former Michigan GOP Co-Chair Meshawn Maddock. DePerno is facing charges for breaching a voting machine in 2020, and Maddock pleaded not guilty in April to eight felony charges stemming from her alleged participation in a fake elector scheme. Pennsylvania is also sending three fake electors as delegates, according to documents reviewed by CNN.

CNN notes that prior to charges being dismissed against fake electors in Nevada, five of the state’s six fake electors were chosen by the Republican Party to attend the RNC. Pam Travis, a fake elector in Wisconsin, is also a delegate for the state, with fellow fake elector Robert Spindell serving as an alternate. Travis and Spindell are both prohibited from serving as electors in future elections as part of a settlement agreement brought against fake electors in Wisconsin.

“Election denialism is like the price of entry now,” former Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger said. “These people that were in the fake elector scheme, or got a mugshot, they’re now the heroes of the movement, and they’ve taken over the party.”

RNC spokesperson Anna Kelly dismissed concerns, telling CNN, “State delegations are made up of delegates elected by their peers at the state party level.”

“This kind of far-right MAGA extremism on full display in today’s GOP is exactly why voters will reject Trump this November,” DNC spokesperson Alex Floyd told CNN.

An estimated 2,429 delegates will be attending the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee next week, where they are expected to formally confirm Trump’s nomination as the Republican candidate for president. Trump needs 1,215 delegates to clinch the Republican Party’s nomination, and received 2,243 in the primaries. Nikki Haley, who received 97 delegates before dropping out, released her delegates this week, directing them to choose Trump.

House Speaker Mike Johnson was one of 204 Republicans who voted for a (failed) resolution to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt for refusing to release audio tapes of special counsel Robert Hur’s interview with President Joe Biden—when just days earlier, he’d tried to stop the vote from happening altogether.

Johnson’s spinelessness was ultimately for nothing, as MAGA Republican Representative Anna Paulina Luna’s “inherent contempt” resolution failed 204–210, with 19 members not voting.

If the resolution had passed, Garland would’ve been fined $10,000 for every day he did not comply with Republicans’ demands to turn over the audio recording, an attempt by the House GOP to turn up the heat on the attorney general, whom they voted to hold in contempt last month. When Biden asserted executive privilege over the recording to block Garland from releasing it, Republicans sued Garland to force his hand.

A total of four Republicans split with the rest of their party. Among them was Representative David Joyce, who also broke the party line in Garland’s contempt vote last month. This time, he was joined by Representatives Tom McClintock, John Duarte, and Mike Turner.

Despite the fact that House Republicans have already received transcripts of the interview, they have continued to demand its full audio. In reality, it appears that Republicans have been ceaselessly targeting Garland as part of their political retribution against the Department of Justice on behalf of Donald Trump.

Earlier this week, Johnson reportedly urged Luna to hold off on calling for a vote on her resolution. While Johnson said he was also concerned about Garland, he believed the House’s lawsuit to enforce their congressional subpoena was enough.

Obviously, Luna didn’t see things that way.

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Luna claimed that the vote had failed due to Republican absences and said she had already refiled and planned to call a vote again when Congress returns to session.

While President Joe Biden meets with NATO members in Washington, D.C., Thursday, Donald Trump is having a foreign tête-à-tête of his own—albeit with a member of a starkly different crowd.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee is scheduled to meet with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at his Florida home, just days after the autocratic leader held private meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin and China’s leader, Xi Jinping.

The agenda of Trump and Orbán’s meeting is not entirely clear, though the war in Ukraine will likely be a topic of discussion, according to three sources that spoke with Reuters.

The visit will add fuel to growing concerns that Orbán is serving as a proxy between Trump and Putin, reported Bloomberg, and will likely upset a cohort of NATO allies who fear that Orbán’s meeting with the Russian ruler legitimized the country’s claim to the land it has invaded in Ukraine since the war began in 2022.

Foreign policy and national security analyst David Rothkopf slammed Trump’s meeting with Orbán. “Trump meeting Orban opposite NATO Summit immediately following Orban mtg w Putin and Xi is the sort of betrayal of the US that would’ve led to Congressional investigations or worse in the past,” Rothkopf wrote on X (formerly Twitter).

Orbán, who was found earlier this year by the European Court of Justice to have violated the Geneva Conventions regarding the rights of refugees*, was described by the late Senator John McCain as a “neofascist dictator.” He’s also curried a certain level of idolatry from the contemporary American right, and has become one of Trump’s strongest international allies.

*This article has been amended to clarify the Geneva Conventions that Orban violated.

Donald Trump claims that he has nothing to do with Project 2025 and has never heard of it, but a shocking number of his administration staffers and Cabinet secretaries played a part in putting together the political manifesto, CNN reports. 

At least 140 people who worked for Trump while he was president were involved in putting together the 900-page playbook, including six members of his Cabinet and four of his ambassadors. The first 20 pages of the document were written by his first deputy chief of staff.

More than half of the authors, editors, and contributors to the project’s manifesto on overhauling the executive branch titled “Mandate for Leadership” were Trump administration staffers, according to CNN’s investigation. Plus, several of the groups advising Project 2025 employ former Trump officials and staffers, including Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows and Trump adviser Stephen Miller.

CNN combed through the online biographies, LinkedIn profiles, and news articles for over 1,000 people listed in the directories for the 110 organizations on Project 2025’s advisory board, in addition to the more than 200 names attached to the “Mandate for Leadership.” In total, almost 240 people have ties to both Trump and Project 2025.

The Project 2025 planning document outlines a dramatic overhaul of the federal government in line with Trump’s authoritarian aspirations, opening the floodgates for extreme policies to be enacted. The former president and convicted felon keeps trying to distance himself from the effort despite his many connections to it, giving Democrats easy lines of attack to point out his lies.

Trump seems to see associating with Project 2025 as bad for his presidential campaign even though it overlaps with his campaign promises. This could backfire on him because his repeated denials are alienating some of his most ardent supporters. The objective truth is that Project 2025 is not just a conservative wish list but also Trump’s, and he isn’t fooling anyone.