Texas AG to Dems: Accept GOP Gerrymandering or I’ll Lock You Up

Texas Democrats are facing a potential lockdown as they oppose Donald Trump’s legislative redistricting effort.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton suggested Thursday that the state legislature could “lock the doors” on liberal-minded party members, trapping them into participating in a forced restructuring of Texas’s congressional maps.

“The House rules and the Senate rules both allow for these people to be arrested if they leave and ... they try to break the quorum,” Paxton told Steve Bannon on his War Room podcast Thursday. “The challenge is if they go out of state, we lose jurisdiction.”

Texas Republicans have dutifully responded to Trump’s demands that the party create five new right-wing seats ahead of the midterm elections. State conservatives unveiled their new House maps Wednesday, proposing to practically eviscerate historically Democratic districts.

State Democrats have planned to abscond from the state in order to avoid the vote. The party began fundraising earlier this week to offset the $500-a-day fines they’ll incur as a result. (Texas House rules prevent lawmakers from using their campaign funds to cover the fines, which were imposed in 2023 after an unsuccessful attempt to stop a Republican-led overhaul of the state’s election laws.)

“Well, when we say that, can’t you get to Texas Rangers?” Bannon asked Paxton. “How are we letting these guys, if they’re leaving the state specifically for the purpose of not coming in for their elected duties, can’t you stop them from leaving the state?”

“If I were the speaker of the House, if I were leading the Senate, I’d put rules in place, depending on which group they think is going to leave,” Paxton said, adding that he believed the House was the more likely group to skip town. “I’d put rules in place that basically lock us in until we get a vote because the House map is up on Friday.”

But Paxton’s vision was more akin to morphing the Pink Dome into a prison than initiating a genuine democratic exchange.

“You could lock them in for the rest of the session—two weeks—and just serve them food there, and they sleep there, and that’s just the way it is because we got to get these maps passed,” Paxton added.

A lawyer who had a starring role in Donald Trump’s first administration—and his attempts to overthrow the 2020 election—is learning that actions have consequences.

The D.C. Bar’s disciplinary arm has recommended that Jeffrey Clark, a longtime Trump ally who currently works in the Office of Management and Budget, be disbarred for his efforts to help the president try to subvert the 2020 election.

“While dishonesty is always intolerable, the facts here are significantly aggravating to warrant disbarment: [Clark] was prepared to cause the Justice Department to tell a lie about the status of its investigation of an important national issue (the integrity of the 2020 Presidential election),” the Bar’s board wrote in its recommendation. “Lawyers cannot advocate for any outcome based on false statements and they certainly cannot urge others to do so. [Clark] persistently and energetically sought to do just that on an important national issue.”

Clark, the former acting assistant attorney general in the environmental division of Trump’s Department of Justice, was a key player in the president’s attempted coup. Trump unsuccessfully tried to install him as acting attorney general in early 2021, and Clark then tried and failed to pressure Georgia lawmakers into overturning the election results (for which he was briefly indicted, before being deleted as a co-conspirator).

To the D.C. Bar, this behavior is severe enough that Clark should lose his legal license. “He should be disbarred as a consequence and to send a message to the rest of the Bar and to the public that this behavior will not be tolerated,” it wrote.

This recommendation will trigger Clark’s automatic suspension, and will head to the D.C. Court of Appeals for a final determination.

During a Thursday Fox Business appearance, Alabama Senator and gubernatorial candidate Tommy Tuberville announced that he’s introducing a bill to ban international students from Iran, China, and North Korea.

Tuberville recalled attending a recent graduation ceremony whose program, he said, included “40 Chinese nationals [getting] their degree in engineering and cyber,” leading him to the conclusion: “We are funding our own demise.”

“We have to do everything we possibly can to penalize universities that drop the ball on this agenda because if we don’t do that, we are not going to educate our kids,” Tuberville said.

The senator also claimed that international students are displacing American students, who “apply, but they can’t get in because there’s no slots for them, because of all the foreign nationals coming in.” To that end, he said his bill includes provisions to limit the total number of international students, while the focus is to keep students from rival countries out.

“We want to make sure we limit the number that comes in,” he said. “But we surely want to limit our adversaries. We want to do away with Iran, North Koreans, or Chinese nationals getting into this country and learning how to destroy the United States of America and our allies.”

Tuberville’s proposal to exclude students on the basis of national origin is so paranoid and nativist as to be absurd. A flood of North Korean students isn’t exactly a serious concern for the United States, which has, reportedly, not since the 2015–2016 school year welcomed a number of students from the People’s Republic that exceeds the single digits.

It’s also simply untrue that foreign students impede the education of American students, as evidence indicates that they are a great boon to the U.S. higher education system.

As the Brookings Institution notes, international students constitute a small minority of U.S. enrollment while contributing disproportionately to college and university budgets, namely in paying higher tuition. They also greatly support their surrounding communities. Removing international students, then, would hurt the economy, “add much to the trade deficit, harm many college budgets, and badly damage businesses in many college towns.”

Further, by subsidizing the cost of domestic students, “international students actually raise domestic enrollment,” according to a 2017 study by economist Kevin Shih, who analyzed periods where foreign enrollment underwent significant booms and busts. Shih estimates that when enrollment increases by 10 additional international students, domestic enrollment increases by about eight—a pattern that holds true as well for enrollment decreases.

One day before Donald Trump’s worldwide tariffs are slated to go into effect, an appeals court is scrutinizing his use of an “emergency” law to justify the sweeping duties.

On Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit heard oral arguments on the legality of the tariffs—a high-stakes lawsuit, brought by 12 Democrat-led states and five small businesses, which could derail the president’s tariff scheme.

Since February, Trump has justified his tariffs by citing the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, a law from 1977 that allows the president to issue economic sanctions in an emergency situation: specifically, to counter an “unusual and extraordinary threat.” Trump’s use of the law allows him to sidestep Congress, which is granted the power to impose tariffs by the Constitution.

He’s the first-ever president to impose tariffs by invoking the emergency law—something many of the appeals judges pointed out.

“It’s just hard for me to see that Congress intended to give the president in IEEPA the wholesale authority to throw out the tariff schedule that Congress has adopted after years of careful work and revise every one of these tariff rates,” said Judge Timothy Dyk. “It’s really kind of asking for an extraordinary change to the whole approach,” he continued.

The act has forced Trump to create so-called emergencies that his tariffs must mitigate. In March, Trump said that the fentanyl emergency was the reason behind his tariffs on Canada, China, and Mexico. In April, he upped the ante and levied a 10 percent global baseline tariff, naming the emergency in question as the trade deficit.

But one judge, Raymond Chen, pushed back on that reasoning: “Can the trade deficit be an extraordinary and unusual threat when we have had trade deficits for decades?”

Overall, CNN reports that 10 out of 11 judges on Thursday were skeptical of the president’s use of the act, questioning why Trump is leaning on a law that makes no reference to tariffs and has never before been used to levy them.

Judge Jimmie Reyna asked, “But IEPPA has been rarely used, hasn’t it? It’s been over 50 years since it’s been used?”

He continued, “IEEPA doesn’t even say tariffs, doesn’t even mention them.”

The U.S. Court of International Trade sided against the president in May, and the administration quickly appealed. The appeals court has allowed Trump’s tariffs to remain in place while the case is being challenged. Depending on the court’s ruling—which, as of now, is not looking too good for Trump—the tariffs’ future could be left in the increasingly partisan hands of the Supreme Court.

Alan Dershowitz has fought many battles over the course of his legal career. He has fought on behalf of O.J. Simpson, Jeffrey Epstein, and Donald Trump. Now he will fight for himself—against a pierogi seller at a Martha’s Vineyard farmers market who was mean to him.

During Wednesday’s episode of the Dershow podcast (that’s what it’s actually called), the constitutional attorney announced his intent to sue a pierogi vendor at the West Tisbury Farmers Market in Massachusetts after the man refused to fork over the dumplings.

“I don’t approve of your politics, I don’t approve of who you’ve represented, I don’t approve of who you support,” Dershowitz recalled the man saying.

Dershowitz recounted that he’d earned strange looks from the same man when he’d visited the stall the week before wearing a T-shirt identifying him as a “Proud Zionist.”

“The clear implication was that he opposed me because I defended Donald Trump and because I was a Zionist,” Dershowitz claimed.

In a video of the incident posted to social media, a police officer informed a distraught Dersh that private establishments have the right to refuse service. While private establishments are barred from discrimination on the basis of sex, race, or religion, political affiliation is not a protected attribute, and neither is defending an alleged sex trafficker with ties to the president.

Three different vendors had made complaints about Dershowitz, the officer said.

On his podcast, Dershowitz said that he would sue the farmers market to adopt a policy to sell to everyone.

He also explained that the insidious bigotry he’d experienced had spread even beyond the farmers market stall: His books had been banned from the libraries, and he’d been  blacklisted from speaking at the synagogue.

“It’s worse than McCarthyism of the 1950s, because McCarthyism of the 1950s went after the people themselves—the communists, the lawyers who represented the communists,” he said. “In Chilmark, they go after my wife, they go after my children, they go after my grandchildren, and they take it out on everybody.”

This isn’t the first time that Dershowitz has claimed McCarthyism has come for Martha’s Vineyard. In 2018, he penned an op-ed for The Hill claiming that he had been shunned from the island’s social scene.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum thinks that solar energy is a bad idea because sometimes it’s night.

During an appearance on Fox Business Thursday morning, Burgum showcased his dim understanding about wind and solar energy while railing against green energy subsidies.

“We’ve had times where, in the last couple of days, in spite of the hundreds of billions of dollars this country has spent on wind, we only had like 1 percent, or 2 percent of electricity being generated by wind,” Burgum said. “And of course, when the sun goes down, you have a catastrophic failure called sunset and there’s no solar energy produced, and yet we’re subsidizing these things that are intermittent, unreliable, and expensive.”

It was Burgum’s easy dismissal of the earth’s primary energy source as “intermittent” or “unreliable” that rang particularly ridiculous, leading some online to question whether the failed presidential candidate had forgotten about the existence of batteries.

In North Dakota, where Burgum previously served as governor, renewable energy, including wind and solar, account for more than 40 percent of the state’s electricity, according to recent data from the Energy Information Administration.

While Burgum backs Trump’s efforts to strip renewable energy projects as part of the path toward energy dominance, China has doubled down on its solar power investments.

Earlier this month, Trump issued an executive order to “end market distorting subsidies” for green energy projects, directing Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to take actions to “strictly enforce the termination of the clean electricity production and investment tax credits.” That order flew in the face of the president’s own behemoth budget bill, which included an amendment to ease the phaseout of tax credits for solar and wind energy under the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act until 2027. It’s tough luck trusting the president.

This week, the Interior Department announced that it would end “special treatment for unreliable energy sources, such as wind,” in accordance with Trump’s directives. The department would also conduct a “careful review of avian mortality rates,” following the president’s many rants that windmills kill birds, which they do, but no more than fossil fuel operations—or house cats. Earlier this week, the president also claimed that offshore windmills were driving whales “loco.”

Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum has, yet again, managed to punt Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again tariff deadline down the road.

“I have just concluded a telephone conversation with the President of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, which was very successful in that, more and more, we are getting to know and understand each other,” wrote Trump on Truth Social on Thursday. “The complexities of a Deal with Mexico are somewhat different than other Nations because of both the problems, and assets, of the Border,” he continued.

“We have agreed to extend, for a 90 Day period, the exact same Deal as we had for the last short period of time, namely, that Mexico will continue to pay a 25% Fentanyl Tariff, 25% Tariff on Cars, and 50% Tariff on Steel, Aluminum, and Copper. Additionally, Mexico has agreed to immediately terminate its Non Tariff Trade Barriers, of which there were many,” Trump wrote, without specifying what “Non Tariff Trade Barriers” would be affected.

Sheinbaum now has 90 more days of the current tariff levels to reach a trade deal with the U.S., according to Trump’s post.

Trump had promised Friday, August 1 as the deadline for implementing a 30 percent tariff on America’s southern neighbor and largest trading partner. But despite his assurances that this deadline is a hard one, Sheinbaum has succeeded in negotiating her way out of the ultimatum.

It’s not the first time: In March, Trump delayed tariffs against Mexico and Canada after a conversation with Sheinbaum, calling her a “very wonderful woman.” The deft negotiation on Sheinbaum’s part earned her the nickname of “world’s leading Trump whisperer” from The Washington Post.

As of now, the Friday deadline remains for countries around the world to come to a deal with Trump or risk incurring so-called “reciprocal” tariffs of up to 50 percent. But whether these tariffs will actually go into effect is yet to be seen—and the finance sector doesn’t seem too convinced. Back in April, after the president announced his shocking “Liberation Day” tariffs across the globe, stocks plummeted and many economists promised a recession.

But then Trump backed down, earning his policies the nickname “TACO”: Trump Always Chickens Out. This time, the boy who cried tariffs has yet to strike fear into the heart of the market, with Wall Street investors predicting—well, exactly what just happened.

Attorney General Pam Bondi on Wednesday issued a memo ordering recipients of federal funding to scrap a stunning array of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives—including antidiscrimination protections.

It’s the latest move by the Trump administration to eliminate DEI programs meant to address inequities stemming from historical injustices such as discrimination, on the grounds that they themselves amount to discrimination.

The new guidance, per Bondi, applies to all federally funded entities or those “otherwise subject to federal antidiscrimination laws, including educational institutions, state and local governments, and public and private employers.” It describes various practices they must do away with in order to comply with the administration’s interpretation of civil rights law and maintain federal funding.

The memo offers specific examples. To give a taste: A state agency that prioritizes awarding contracts to women-owned or minority-owned businesses will be engaged in unlawful practices. As will institutions that mandate or “implicitly prioritize” “diverse slate” hiring or selection practices.

Also to be eliminated are scholarships, internships, and other programs limiting eligibility to certain protected groups (the memo offers the example of a “Black Student Excellence Scholarship”), as well as employee training programs that “single out, demean, or stereotype individuals” (for example, by including phrases like “toxic masculinity”).

According to the memo, college lounges or other facilities designated for students belonging to certain identity groups, “even if access is technically open for all,” can constitute unlawful segregation. But “while compelled segregation is generally impermissible,” Bondi adds, allowing transgender people to use bathrooms or participate on sports teams according to their gender identity “can also violate federal law.”

A $1.26 billion contract to build the nation’s largest detention center was awarded to a little-known Virginia company—which doesn’t even have an office.

On July 18, the Acquisition Logistics Company won a federal contract to build and operate a detention center in El Paso County, Texas, at the Fort Bliss Army base.

But according to The Richmonder, the company is “not a household name”: Its website is largely inaccessible without a login, it only has 39 employees (according to ZoomInfo), and its headquarters is listed as a regular house in a suburban Richmond neighborhood called Tuckahoe.

Acquisition Logistics Company was awarded the contract through a government program that directs federal dollars to small businesses, according to Bloomberg. Founded by a retired Navy officer in 2008, it specializes in supply chain management, mostly for the U.S. military, and has had previous, far smaller contracts with the Defense Department.

The company’s CEO and founder, Kenneth Wagner, and COO Darrin Armentrout didn’t respond to The Richmonder’s request for comment. When called, Wagner picked up the phone—and promptly hung up.

The 5,000-bed Texas tent camp they are tasked with building would be the biggest in the nation, and has unsurprisingly sparked concerns among immigration advocates.

“It’s very hard to imagine how soft-sided facilities could satisfy even the low detention standards that are reflected in ICE’s most recent standards,” Emma Winger, deputy legal director at the American Immigration Council, told Bloomberg in July.

Advocates like Winger have serious reason to doubt the setup: Recent reports from ICE detention facilities paint a horrifying and inhumane picture of the conditions, with immigrants treated “like dogs” at several Florida facilities. For scale, “Alligator Alcatraz,” Trump’s hastily erected, bug-infested tent camp, has 700 beds. The El Paso camp would have over seven times that.

And in addition to the inherent inhumanity of imprisoning people in modern-day concentration camps, the new behemoth center would be run by a company with no experience managing a detention facility, nor handling a project of this financial weight: This contract would be 442 times larger than the size of Acquisition Logistics Company’s last published contract, according to The Richmonder.

Donald Trump’s efforts to chill legal challenges against his agenda appear to have worked, as Big Law has reached a new low to spare themselves from the president’s wrath.

Reuters reported on Thursday that, after striking deals with the Trump administration, dozens of major law firms are keeping their distance from pro bono work for causes and clients that conflict with Trump’s agenda, and are keeping their distance from litigation against the federal government, leaving advocacy and nonprofit groups to fend for themselves.

Fourteen civil rights groups said that the law firms they have relied on in the past have been hesitant to engage with them, either agreeing to provide confidential help, or turning them down altogether, Reuters reported. Earlier this year, when the Texas Civil Rights Project sought lawyers to provide pro bono work challenging immigration arrests, all of the group’s usual contacts balked.

Reuters’ analysis of court dockets also revealed that Big Law firms had for the most part backed off litigation against the Trump administration—a significant shift from the president’s first term when twenty of the largest law firms challenged his agenda.

The 50 top law firms in the country have represented plaintiffs in only 3 percent of the 865 lawsuits filed under the Administrative Procedure Act, the law that allows challenges to executive actions, since Trump reentered the White House. Those same firms were involved in 9 percent of the whopping 3,400 cases during his firm term. Firms like Paul Weiss and Simpson Thacher, which both challenged Trump the first time around, have now been tucked away in the president’s legal war chest.

Earlier this year, nine major law firms struck deals with the Trump administration to provide pro bono work, after the president targeted firms with executive orders sanctioning them. He’d specifically targeted firms with attorneys who had investigated the president, or defended his enemies, ordering them to end their diversity practices, and entreating them to make a deal. As a result, nine major firms struck deals. Trump walked away with the promise of nearly $940 million in pro bono work on issues that support the president’s agenda.

While four firms fought Trump’s executive orders and won, it seems that the president’s actions have had a broader chilling effect. A whopping 46 of the 50 top-grossing U.S. firms have removed references to DEI from their websites. Seventeen firms have revised descriptions of their pro bono practices to remove causes unsavory to the president, like immigration and racial justice, and three have added language from their deals about supporting veterans and fighting antisemitism.

In May, a group of Democratic lawmakers warned the firms that such deals were unenforceable, and potentially violated federal and state law. Many of the firms have maintained that they’ve kept total control over selecting clients—but that hasn’t stopped them from cowering away from helping those targeted by the president’s sweeping agenda.

The chilling effect goes further than just the law firms—civic groups are similarly concerned about challenging the president’s agenda on issues like transgender rights, immigration rights. Of the 33 groups who spoke to Reuters, all but six fretted that pursuing these causes could risk their access to legal aid in the future.