Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa is a combat veteran. She retired from the army as a Lieutenant Colonel. She is also a sexual assault survivor. She is also hyper-conservative.
You would expect that she would have some problems with Pete Hegseth, Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Defense. Hegseth has been accused of assaulting women, of public drunkenness, of mismanaging two very small conservative veterans’ group. And he opposes women in combat.
Hegseth is not the kind of guy you would expect Ernst to support.
At first, on hearing of his nomination, she expressed her doubts. But then MAGA began to apply pressure. She comes up for re-election in 2026; it’s hard to imagine anyone running to her right, but who knows?
It’s remarkable how fast you can go from guest to entree at the big MAGA buffet.
Iowa U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst certainly knows.
Last week, she committed the grave offense of being a voice of reason. She told Real Clear Politics she had not made up her mind on Pete Hegseth’s nomination to become secretary of defense.
Ernst said she didn’t plan to campaign against Hegseth and wanted to see the confirmation process unfold. How unreasonable, a senator wanting to follow the Senate process before making a final decision. She’s a pivotal vote on the Armed Services Committee, which will be handling Hegseth’s confirmation.
But then, the MAGA warning light flashed, and all hell broke loose.
Fox News showed a series of X posts aimed at Ernst.
Donald Trump Jr pointed out Ernst had voted to confirm Joe Biden’s pick for defense secretary, Lloyd Austin. He suggested Ernst may be “in the wrong political party.”
Somebody called Wall Street Mav called Ernst a “neocon.” Gasp. And suggested she face a conservative primary opponent in 2026. Right-wing radio host Steve Deace bragged he could be the one to topple Ernst in that primary. Or maybe double Arizona failure Kari Lake could return to her Iowa roots. Sure.
Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA (his turn signal blinking toward the abyss) accused Ernst of “leading the charge” against Hegseth.
Ernst is the first woman combat veteran elected to the U.S. Senate. Pete Hegseth is a Fox News personality who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s also been overserved many times. He’s vowed to quit drinking if confirmed.
A woman has accused Hegseth of sexual assault. This, alongside multiple reports of sexual misconduct and mismanagement of veterans’ groups he led.
But MAGA has decided he’s the sort of strong, rugged, take-no-prisoners guy we need to make America tough again. He’ll fix the “woke” military, whatever that means.
Hegseth said women don’t belong in combat. Ernst is a combat veteran. He’s accused of sexual assault. Ernst is a sexual assault survivor. So, Ernst was supposed embrace this guy’s nomination? Be impressed by his raw manliness? Suddenly I could use a drink.
But by Monday, after a weekend of MAGA bludgeoning, Ernst took a step back. She met again with Hegseth, was encouraged and said the allegations against him won’t count unless victims step forward.
“As I support Pete through this process, I look forward to a fair hearing based on truth, not anonymous sources,” Ernst said.
But after that process, will you vote for him? She didn’t really go there. But it’s likely she’ll vote to confirm.
It’s disappointing, but not unexpected. I wish she would have said, “Pete Hegseth? I wouldn’t put that guy in charge of latrines. I wouldn’t hand him the keys to the nation’s military if he was the last man on earth. And that last man thing sounds pretty good right now.”
What Ernst said last week was spot on. If this guy wants to become secretary of defense, he’s going to have to show he’s capable. That’s what the confirmation process is for. Ernst wanting to wait and see the show makes sense.
Only one top Iowa Republican defended her, Rep. Ashely Hinson. But Hinson also had to do her duty and say Hegseth is a “strong pick.”
Yes, I know. Ernst played her own role in creating the MAGA monster. Now she got a glimpse of what happens when it turns on you. No loyalty and genuflecting before the dear leader can save you. Toe the MAGA line, or else. This is the party of freedom.
(319) 398-8262; todd.dorman@thegazette.com
The “party of freedom”? Yes, you are free to agree with Trump and free to praise him.
Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire publisher of the Los Angeles Times, recently revealed that the newspaper would employ a technology that will tell “both sides” of every story. Journalists are outraged by the implication that their stories are biased. After the publisher’s decision to prohibit an endorsement in the Presidential race, the chief editor of the editorial board resigned, followed by others.
At that time, the published defended
The New York Times reported:
Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of The Los Angeles Times, said on Thursday that he planned to introduce a “bias meter” next to the paper’s news and opinion coverage as part of his campaign to overhaul the publication.
Dr. Soon-Shiong, who in October quashed a planned presidential endorsement for Vice President Kamala Harris from The Los Angeles Times’s editorial board, said in an interview that aired on Scott Jennings’s podcast “Flyover Country” that he had begun to see his newspaper as “an echo chamber and not a trusted source.”
He previously said he planned to remake the paper’s editorial board and add more conservative voices. He has asked Mr. Jennings, a CNN political commentator and a Republican strategist, to join it.
Dr. Soon-Shiong, who bought The Times in 2018, said on the podcast that he had been working with a team to create the so-called bias meter using technology he had been building in his health care businesses.
On news and opinion articles, “you have a bias meter so somebody could understand, as a reader, that the source of the article has some level of bias,” he explained in the interview. “And what we need to do is not have what we call confirmation bias, and then that story automatically — the reader can press a button and get both sides of that exact same story based on that story, and then give comments.”
He said he planned to introduce the tool in January.
Dr. Soon-Shiong’s latest comments set off immediate pushback from the L.A. Times Guild, which represents journalists at the paper.
“Recently, the newspaper’s owner has publicly suggested his staff harbors bias, without offering evidence or examples,” the union’s leadership said in a statement on Thursday. The union said all Times staff members abided by ethics guidelines that call for “fairness, precision, transparency, vigilance against bias and an earnest search to understand all sides of an issue.”
In the comments that followed the article, many ridiculed the idea of the “bias meter.” One imagined an article that reported on an earthquake rated 9.5, which said that people feared that the earthquake would cause massive destruction of lives and property; those seeking a different perspective would press the bias meter to read an article saying that most people were not afraid of a 9.5 earthquake and say it’s no big deal.
During the campaign, Democrats continually drew attention to the radical proposals of Project 2025 as the agenda for a second Trump term. Trump distanced himself from Project 2025 and pretended to know nothing about it or anyone who wrote it. Now that he is President-elect, Project 2025 is indeed Trump’s agenda.
Someone on social media asked, “If Trump disavowed Project 2025 when campaigning, isn’t I clear that he has no “mandate” to act on it?
The LA Times reports:
Russell Vought, one of the chief architects of Project 2025 — a conservative blueprint for the next presidency — is no fan of the federal government that President-elect Donald Trump will soon lead.
He believes “woke” civil servants and “so-called expert authorities” wield illegitimate power to block conservative White House directives from deep within federal agencies, and wants Trump to “bend or break” that bureaucracy to his will, he wrote in the second chapter of the Project 2025 playbook.
Vought is a vocal proponent of a plan known as Schedule F, under which Trump would fire thousands of career civil servants with extensive experience in their fields and replace them with his own political loyalists, and of Christian nationalism, which would see American governance aligned with Christian teachings. Both are core tenets of Project 2025.
Throughout his campaign, Trump adamantly disavowed Project 2025, even though its policies overlapped with his and some of its authors worked in his first administration. He castigated anyone who suggested the blueprint, which polls showed was deeply unpopular among voters, represented his aims for the presidency.
But last week, the president-elect nominated Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget, which oversees the White House budget and its policy agenda across the federal government.
Trump called Vought, who held the same role during his first term, an “aggressive cost cutter and deregulator” who “knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end Weaponized Government.”
The nomination was one of several Trump has made since his election that have called into question his claims on the campaign trail that Project 2025 was not his playbook and held no sway over him or his plans for a second term.
He selected Tom Homan, a Project 2025 contributor and former visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative organization behind the blueprint, as his “border czar.” Trump named Stephen Miller, an immigration hard-liner also linked to Project 2025, as his deputy chief of staff for policy. Both also served in the first Trump administration.
He also named Brendan Carr to serve on the Federal Communications Commission. Carr wrote a chapter of Project 2025 on the FCC, which regulates U.S. internet access and TV and radio networks, and has echoed Trump’s claimsthat news broadcasters have engaged in political bias against Trump.
Trump named John Ratcliffe as his pick for CIA director and Pete Hoekstra as ambassador to Canada. Both are Project 2025 contributors. It has also been reported that the Trump transition team is filling lower-level government spots using a Project 2025 database of conservative candidates.
During the campaign Trump said that he knew “nothing about” Project 2025 and that he found some of its ideas “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.” In response to news in July that Project 2025’s director, Paul Dans, was leaving his post, Trump campaign managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles — whom the president-elect has since named his chief of staff — issued a statement saying that “reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed.”
Asked about Trump’s selection of several people with Project 2025 connections to serve in his administration, Trump transition spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt responded with a statement, saying Trump “never had anything to do with Project 2025.”
“This has always been a lie pushed by the Democrats and the legacy media, but clearly the American people did not buy it because they overwhelmingly voted for President Trump to implement the promises that he made on the campaign trail,” Leavitt wrote. “All of President Trump’s cabinet nominees and appointments are whole-heartedly committed to President Trump’s agenda, not the agenda of outside groups.”
In addition to calling for much greater power in the hands of the president, Project 2025 calls for less federal intervention in certain areas — including through the elimination of the Department of Education. It calls for much stricter immigration enforcement and mass deportations — a policy priority of Trump’s as well — and rails against environmental protections, calling for the demolition of key environmental agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service.
It calls for tougher restrictions on abortion and for the federal government to collect data on women who seek an abortion, and backs a slew of measures that would strip rights from LGBTQ+ people.
For Trump’s critics, his selections make it clear that his disavowal of the conservative playbook was nothing more than a campaign ploy to pacify voters who viewed the plan as too far to the right. It’s an argument many were making before the election as well.
Before the election of 2020, Joe Biden made some exciting promises to educators. He said publicly at a televised event in Pittsburgh that he would get rid of the onerous federal testing mandate. And he pledged to stop funding charter schools. The U.S. Department of Education hands out $440 million every year to create new charter schools or to expand existing charter schools. The Network for Public Education has published studies that document the wastefulness of the federal Charter Schools Program’s’ extravant funding but it survives nonetheless, because of Democratic choice fans like Speaker Hakeem Jeffries, Senator Michael Bennett, and Senator Corey Booker.
President Biden did not keep his promises. He didn’t even try.
He could have chosen a leader for the U.S. Department of Education who would fight to fulfill his promises. He didn’t.
Cardona did not take aim at the onerous federal testing program that is a remnant of George W. Bush’s failed No Child Left Behind law. NCLB was enacted in 2002. Twenty-two years ago. Does anyone believe that “no child was left behind”? Did the billions of dollars spent on annual testing of every single student in grades 3-8 has lift achievement to new heights and close achievement gaps? No. Dr
Instead, he chose Miguel Cardona, the State Commissioner of Connecticut, an amiable man who never says or does anything controversial. He did not repeat any of Biden’s promises.
Did Secretary Cardona propose any revision of the law? True, it went from NCLB to the equally ludicrous “Every Student Succeeds Act” in 2015. But has every student succeeded just because the law got a new name? No. What did Secretary Cardona propose? Nothing.
During Secretary Cardona’s tenure, there was an explosion in manufactured hostility towards public schools and their teachers, led by rightwing groups like “Moms for Liberty.” And these groups loudly demanded censorship of books in school libraries. Under the guise of “parental rights,” small numbers of very aggressive people made absurd claims about public schools: that teachers were “grooming” children to be gay or transgender; that school nurses were performing surgery in their offices to change boys into girls; that schools kept litter boxes for students who identified as cats; that public schools were “indoctrinating” students into radical views about race, gender, and American history. Teachers were fired for daring to teach “banned books” or accurate history about racism.
All of this was crazy stuff, spun out of whole cloth. Just plain nuts.
While our public schools were reeling from the barrage of lies about them, who were their defenders? The unions, for sure. PEN International. The American Library Association. Publishers. But where was the U.S. Department of Education? I honestly don’t know. It was a time when a strong and forceful voice was needed to stand up to the censors and bullies. I didn’t hear it. Did anyone else?
President Biden pledged to support public schools and to end federal favoritism for privately-managed charter schools. That didn’t happen. Rather than challenging the powerful charter school lobby, Secretary Cardona accepted its invitation to be the keynote speaker at the annual meeting of the National Association of Public Charter Schools in 2021.
The federal Charter Schools Program gets $440 million every year to open new charter schools or to fund the expansion of charter chains. The Biden administration didn’t try to kill the appropriation, but it did enact regulations for CSP, a striking achievement. But it then ignored its own regulations, funding segregated charter schools that the regulations forbade.
Probably the worst example of a charter school that received a large federal grant despite its failure to comply with the Department’s regulations was the Cincinnati Classical Academy.
Last year, the U.S. Department of Education gave $2 million to the Cincinnati Classical Academy, a charter school created by Hillsdale College, the far-right institution closely aligned with former (and future) President Trump. The school claimed in its application that it intended to provide quality education for needy minority students, but in fact the school serves an overwhelmingly white, affluent population.
The Network for Public Education was all over this $2 million grant because it was such a flagrant violation of the Department’s own regulations.
Carol Burris, the executive director of NPE, wrote a letter that was cosigned by more than a dozen local education and civil rights groups in Cincinnati. The letter was sent a year ago, with hopes that the Departnent would recall the grant because of false and misleading information in its grant application.
The Department did nothing. No action was taken.
Please read the letter:
December 4, 2023
The Honorable Miguel Cardona Secretary
U.S. Department of Education 400 Maryland Avenue, SW Washington, D.C. 20202
Dear Secretary Cardona:
We write to express our deep concern regarding the two Charter School Programs awards given to Cincinnati Classical Academy (CCA), a Hillsdale member charter school. CCA received a $100,000 planning grant from Ohio’s State Entities grant in 2021-2022, and in 2023, a Developer grant directly from your Department in the amount of $1,991,846. This letter provides evidence that the application submitted to your Department contained false and misleading information on which the award was based.
Further, after reading the three application reviewers’ notes, it is apparent that no attempt was made to fact check the application. Instead, the reviewers ignored what should have been obvious redflags, as we explain below.
A detailed summary of the false and misleading information presented in the application is also provided. We ask you to investigate the awardee Cincinnati Classical Academy’s application and claims and terminate the grant based on that review.
Evidence of the Intent to Mislead the Department Regarding the Purpose of the Grant
Throughout the application, the charter school repeats that it is worthy of the grant because CCA exists to provide a high-quality alternative for disadvantaged students in Cincinnati’s public schools. The first two objectives, as stated in the application, are as follows: (1) help to close the achievement gap for economically disadvantaged students in southwestern Ohio; (2) continue to provide a proven and tuition- free charter school option to underserved children and families in an area where limited options for quality schools exist.
To make its case, the application cites demographic information for the city of Cincinnati, which, according to the application, is 41.37% African American/Black, 53.3% white, and has a high poverty rate. Helping students escape poverty and serving underserved students continue as themes throughout the application, justifying the grant.
However, as the table below shows, the school is not serving the underserved students of the area but rather a population that is dramatically whiter and wealthier than not only the city of Cincinnati but the entire County of Hamilton.
The table below provides the 2022-2023 school year demographic distribution of students in the Cincinnati School District public schools, all Hamilton County Schools, all charter schools in Hamilton County, and the applicant—Cincinnati Classical Academy. School enrollment was 452. The demographics of CCA do not reflect either Cincinnati School District public schools or the schools of Hamilton County, which the charter school purports to serve.
Yet, it never provided a demographic breakdown of its students for its first or second year; it only gave a demographic breakdown of the population of Cincinnati. Nor did it acknowledge the under-enrollment of disadvantaged students or put forth a plan to address it. None of its goals and objectives address the lack of diversity and under-enrollment of underserved students. Even more concerning is that the three reviewers never noted the absence of demographic information and instead parroted the application’s assertion that the school was in a high-needs area.
The applicant certainly knew the disproportionate enrollment of wealthier white students in the charter school when it submitted its application in July of 2023. According to the application, 98.2% of the 2022- 23 students were returning in 2023-2024; therefore, the applicant also knew that the school’s demographics would remain stable. It was merely adding a grade level to accommodate its present sixth- grade class.
In summary, although the applicant stated its mission to be closing the achievement gap and serving disadvantaged students, the applicant knew that its student body made the serious fulfillmentof that mission impossible. We also believe this disproportionality in enrollment is by design, as explained below.
Location of Cincinnati Classical Academy
The applicant states the following regarding the location of the charter school: “The location within a diverse neighborhood with access to direct route highways to all areas of the city has allowed CCA to provide a high-quality tuition-free classical education model to adiverse student population, including student’s [sic] representative of urban intergenerational poverty and those experiencing social and economic deprivation during childhood and adolescence.”
Although the school’s mailing address gives the impression that the school is located in Cincinnati, the school is located in Reading, Ohio, a city that is an inner suburb of the Cincinnati metropolitan area.
According to the latest census, 84.8% of Reading residents are white,7.7% are Black, and 10.6% live in poverty5. The village of Evendale that abuts the school property is also predominantly white and has a poverty rate of 2.8%,6 significantly below the Cincinnati rate of 24.7%7, which is nearly twice the national rate.
The location of the school was a deliberate choice. According to theschool’s website, the charter school had sought to locate the school in the former Catholic school facility since 2020.
From the website:
The new school has had interest in the property since 2020, but at that time Ohio law allowed public community schools [charter schools] to locate only in“challenged” school districts. That did not include Reading. In a surprise turn of events, Ohio H.B. 110 removed this restriction starting July 1, 2021.
“We were elated. We contacted the parish immediately to explore their interest,” Hartings said. “We were so fortunate to find a community that shares our values and goals, and that embraced the kind of school we are offering. The campus means a lot to the community, which has several generations of memories there.”8
According to the submitted application, the charter school gives preference to resident children of the Reading Community School District, as required by Ohio State law. Therefore, the placement of the charter school in a “non-challenged “school district would likely result in a student population that was whiter and wealthier than the population described in the application.
Forward Face of the Cincinnati Classical Charter Academy
The forward face of a charter school is its website. From a school’s website, parents glean its philosophy and culture. What is featured on CCA’s website provides insight into the families the school wishes to attract. The applicant claims it seeks a “diverse student population,including student’s [sic] representative of urban intergenerational poverty and those experiencing social and economic deprivation during childhood and adolescence.”
The CCA website, however, describes the school as providing “a tuition-free, classical liberal arts education” in “partnership with Hillsdale College,” a private Christian college, with no forward mention that the school is a charter school. The featured slide deck zooms in on the Christian cross on the school building. Although there is information on the school’s catered lunch program, it does not mention any provision for free or reduced-price lunches. Nowhere on the website does the school provide information in Spanish or other languages or indicate that it is inviting either socio-economically or racially diverse students.
In pictures of classrooms and hallways, the student body shows few students of color and no faculty of color. An image of the gymnasium shows a crucifix displayed on the wall, which we have been advised violates the law and the terms of the grant. A review of the school’svirtual tour features white students and a white faculty and administration.
Inaccuracies in the Application
Throughout the application, the applicant touts the first-year achievement results on state tests provided on page 759 of the application in Appendix G15. The applicant claims, “These results were achieved with
The Department reviewers never questioned why the school never included demographic information. Instead, reviewers parroted back what the applicant said as if it were fact. A simple visit to the school website would have revealed the school for what it is. The lack of fact-checking by reviewers solicited from the charter community has been an ongoing concern.
a diverse student population that evidences the appeal of the Hillsdale K-12 classical education model to families from diverse cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds,” a claim which is clearly an over- exaggeration.
The school’s proficiency rates on page 759 do not match those listedon the state website.9 For example, the Ohio Education Department lists CCA’s 6th grade proficiency for the 2022-23 year as 76.9% and mathematics as 43.4%. These same rates are included in the school’s annual report.
Yet, the application lists the rates of the same grade level as 92% and70%, respectively. Inflated rates are given in the application for every grade level in the school.
To further make its case, it compares the school’s ratings to those of what it refers to as underperforming public schools in an underserved target area. It begins with the performance of the Cincinnati Public Schools and continues with schools in a five-mile radius. None of the schools listed in that five-mile radius are part of the Cincinnati Public School system. It should also be noted that the names of the schools it lists for the Reading School District are incorrect, and there are three, not four, schools in that district.
Conclusion
To be blunt, CCA is designed to attract an elite student body whose families seek a private school experience paid for by taxpayers. Its videos, website, and literature, which include showcasing the cross on the top of the building and a crucifix in the gymnasium, are designed to attract white Christian middle- class families from the diverse districts in the area.
The application does not report or explain its lack of diversity. Instead, it masquerades as an equity initiative. The application does not present a plan to become more diverse but instead funding to expand a grade level each year.
While it is true the charter school’s proficiency rates exceed the state, that is hardly surprising given that nearly half of all Ohio publicschool students are economically disadvantaged compared to less than17% of CCA.
Therefore, we ask that the grant to CCA be terminated and, based on the false and misleading information that the school provided, that allmoney be returned to the Department and no further money bedisbursed.
Respectfully submitted,
The Network for Public Education
With:
Greg Landsman, Ohio Congressional District 1
Catherine Ingram, Ohio Senator District 9
Child Wellness Fund, Inc.
Cleveland Heights Teachers Union
Erase the Space
Public Education Partners- Ohio
Cincinnati Federationof Teachers
Cincinnati Mennonite Fellowship
Bold New Democracy
Dani Isaacsohn, Ohio State Representative District 24
Cecil Thomas, Ohio Representative District 25
Sedrick Denson, OhioState Representative District 26
Rachel Baker, Ohio State Representative District 27
JessicaMiranda, Ohio State RepresentativeDistrict 28
Ohio PTA
Ohio Education Association
Ohio Federation of Teachers
Cincinnati NAACP
Heights Coalition for Public Education
Honesty for Ohio Education
Northeast Democratic Club
Northeast Ohio Friends of Public Education
Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding
The Republican supermajority in the state’s General Assembly is shameless. They used their numbers to pass a bill that strips the newly elected Democratic Governor, State Attorney General, and State Superintendent of Schools of many of their powers.
Outgoing Democratic Governor Roy Cooper vetoed the bill, but Republicans overturned his veto.
The Republican power grab was embedded in a bill that shortchanged the victims of Hurricane Helene.
When will voters in North Carolina wise up and start voting for Democratic legislators? The ones they have now are not working on behalf of their constituents.
They are using their power to protect their power and perks. The public be damned! Vote them out!
Trump selected a hard-right lawyer, Harmeet K. Dhillon, as assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the Department of Justice. She is the former vice-chair of the California Republican Party. Born in India, she is a practicing Sikh. She was leader of Lawyers for Trump in 2020, which tried to overturn the election.
In standard Trump fashion, he has selected a hard-right lawyer who has never fought for traditional civil rights issues, but will vigorously support his anti-“woke,” anti-DEI agenda.
She has opposed corporate diversity programs, COVID safety measures, and gender-affirming care for transgender people.
In sum, her own priorities are exactly the opposite of the division she was chosen to lead. Under Trump, the civil rights gains of the past 60 years will go dormant or be reversed.
Trump said in a press release:
“Throughout her career, Harmeet has stood up consistently to protect our cherished Civil Liberties, including taking on Big Tech for censoring our Free Speech, representing Christians who were prevented from praying together during COVID, and suing corporations who use woke policies to discriminate against their workers.”
Dhillon founded a law practice, Dillon Law Group Inc., and a nonprofit firm called the Center for American Liberty. She gained notoriety filing free speech-suits on behalf of conservative clients, including the Berkeley College Republicans and a Google engineer who was fired for his memo blasting the company’s diversity policies. She led multiple lawsuits against the state of California in 2020, challenging Covid-19 policies like stay at home orders and mail-in ballots.
In the lead up to the 2024 election, she led the effort to prevent Colorado from knocking Trump off the ballot.
On Dec. 28, 2023, the day after the Colorado Republican Party asked the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in on the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to disqualify former President Donald Trump from appearing on the state’s primary ballot, Harmeet Dhillon tweeted: “Democrats are conspiring to commit the biggest election interference fraud in world history, right before our eyes, as government officials avert their eyes to the mockery of the constitution and our laws. This is a low point in American history.”
It’s a typical statement for Dhillon: defending Trump, bashing Democrats and alluding to a crime they’re committing that didn’t actually happen. The kind of statement her biggest client, Trump, would tweet. Lately, Dhillon’s been busy with Trump’s effort to remain on the ballot in the 2024 presidential race. The Dhillon Law Group is one of the law firms representing the former president in his legal fights in Maine and Colorado to remain on those state’s ballots.
Over the past few years, Dhillon — a conservative lawyer and the Republican national committeewoman from California — has become a fixture in Trump’s GOP, appearing on Fox News to rail against Democrats, cancel culture and the “woke” liberal agenda and representing the likes of Tucker Carlson, Andy Ngo and other far-right personalities in headline-seeking free speech lawsuits…
Dhillon and her namesake law firm she founded in 2006 has become one of the leading legal groups working to roll back voting rights across the country. In the past few years, Dhillon — or an attorney from her law firm — has been involved in at least 16 different lawsuits in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Maine, Michigan, North Carolina, Virginia and Washington, D.C. challenging voting rights laws, redistricting, election processes or Trump’s efforts to appear on the ballot in the 2024 election, according to our case database.
And, much like her biggest client, the lawyer who’s representing the former president and asserted herself as a legal crusader to roll back voting rights has her own sordid history of controversy. That includes promoting baselessconspiracy theories, connections to controversial right-wing groups like the Federalist Society and Turning Point USA and questionable financial dealings involving her nonprofit, the Center for American Liberty.
Democracy Docket reported in a post yesterday that Dhillon has a history of opposing laws to strengthen voting rights:
In the past few years, Dhillon — or an attorney from her law firm — has been involved in more than a dozen lawsuits challenging voting rights laws across the country.
How will she defend voting rights when she opposed them in private practice? Will she defend equal treatment of women and oppose discrimination against racial minorities? Will she defend LGBT persons who are discriminated against?
Don’t be surprised when she doesn’t. You have been warned.
The New Republic writes about how easy it will be to bribe Trump. The emoluments clause in the Constitution has been rendered meaningless–the one that says the President can’t profit from his office. In his first term, nations and lobbyists paid him off by renting luxury suites at the Trump hotel near the White House. Now the possibilities are much greater.
In addition, the U.S. Supreme Court has given Trump absolute immunity for criminal acts he performs while acting as President. So we can expect to see the President selling watches, Bibles, sneakers, NFT trading cards, perfume, and whatever in nightly addresses from the Oval Office.
Imagine a Presidential press conference where Trump has commercial breaks to sell his merch!
Just one more norm to break!
The story begins:
I know what you’re thinking. How can I, a 98-pound weakling, DEREGULATE my industry or win fat GOVERNMENT CONTRACTS? But after last week’s election, there’s NEVER been a better time to BRIBE THE PRESIDENT! As a candidate, Donald Trump said that, if elected, he would put his second term UP FOR SALE! Contribute to my campaign, he told oil and gas industry representatives, and REGULATORY RELIEF IS YOURS!
But wait, you say. Aren’t there emoluments clauses in the Constitution that FORBID this? Isn’t BRIBERY of public officials AGAINST THE LAW? Not really, thanks to EXCITING NEW OPPORTUNITIES opened up by Supreme Court rulings and the Trump team’s own thrilling CULTURE OF IMPUNITY!
The Pre-Election Presidential Transition Act requires major-party nominees for president to submit, before the election, a Memo of Understanding to the General Services Administration articulating an ethics policy to avoid conflicts of interest. Trump signed the MOU last time. He hasn’t submitted one this time, even though the deadline was October 1. Until he does, Trump is barred from carrying out certain transition functions. Probably he’ll sign eventually, but once he does the GSA will impose a $5,000 limit on private contributions to his transition and a disclosure requirement, neither of which is really the Trump way. Presumably Trump will tap many of the same donors who gave to him last time, including AT&T, General Electric, Microsoft, Exxon Mobil, and JPMorgan Chase. Meanwhile, no dollar limits inhibit contributions to Trump’s inaugural committee, which last time included $5 millionfrom the late Sheldon Adelson. Adelson’s finances are now in the hands of his widow, Miriam, whom Trump will likely tap again.
Am I saying any of these corporations or individuals extracted promises back in 2016 in exchange for their contributions? I am not. Back then they were deterred by fear of prosecution. But they have much less to fear now, because last June, in the latest of its rulings to render the federal bribery statute completely unenforceable, the Supreme Court ruled that a politician who gets paid off by the beneficiary of some past action is accepting a legal gratuity and not an illegal bribe. Less than one month after this decision (Snyder v. United States) came Trump v. United States, where the court ruled that a president couldn’t be prosecuted for any act performed as part of his official duties. The combined effect is that the highest court in the land is practically inviting you to bribe your president. You might risk offending it if you turn this fabulous offer down! The Supreme Court’s lassitude about bribery, however, bumps up against its lassitude about presidential immunity in an interesting way that I’ll discuss in a bit.
As for the emoluments clauses (two of which apply to the president; a third is for members of Congress), the Supreme Court long ago made clear it had no intention of enforcing those. In 2020 the high court declined to hear an emoluments case (Blumenthal v. Trump) brought by members of Congress, thereby upholding a lower-court ruling that Congress lacked standing. In 2021 the court dispensed with two other emoluments cases (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW) v. Donald J. Trump and the District of Columbia v. Trump), both filed way back in 2017, by delaying action until five days after Joe Biden was inaugurated president and then declaring the lawsuits moot.
The high court resorted to this evasion because any ruling on the cases’ merits would have had to acknowledge that Trump, serially and flagrantly, violated the emoluments clauses both foreign (“no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust … shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State”) and domestic (“The President shall … not receive … any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them”).
There’s a rich literature on the many and varied ways Trump made mincemeat of the emoluments clauses during his first term, including tworeports by the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, one on foreign emoluments and one on domestic, and an update to the foreign emoluments report by CREW. According to CREW, Trump’s businesses received $13.6 million in payments from foreign governments during his presidency, including $5.7 million from China (mostly stays at Trump hotels), nearly $4 million from the United Kingdom (tax bailouts for two money-losing Trump golf resorts in Scotland), $1.1 million from Qatar (purchase of four units in Trump World Tower in New York City plus hotel stays at the now-defunct Trump International in Washington), and $885,000 from Saudi Arabia (which since 2001 has owned the 45thfloor of Trump World Tower; the Saudis also logged many stays at the Trump International). This tally excludes a reported $10 million campaign contribution that Trump’s 2016 campaign accepted from Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi. Such a contribution, if it was given, would be illegal. A Justice Department investigation of the alleged contribution was shut down by Trump Attorney General William Barr.
On the domestic front, federal and state officials spent, over just an 11-month period, more than $163,000 on rooms at the Trump International, including eight people Trump appointed ambassador and three people Trump appointed to the federal bench. Meanwhile, the Secret Service paid $1.4 million to various Trump properties in the United States so that it might carry out its duties to protect the president and his family from physical harm, at rates as much as 4.5 times the federal per diem. In some instances the Secret Service paid more than Trump charged members of the Qatari royal family. The Secret Service isn’t trying to bribe Trump, of course, but because its stays were paid from the Treasury they violated the domestic emoluments clause, which is triggered by the expenditure of government money.
Since Trump’s first term, opportunities to fill Trump’s pockets have proliferated. Truth Social is a money-losing social-media platform whose stock price is up 180 percent since late September. As I’ve noted before, Trump’s fans are much more interested in buying shares in his social-media platform than in using it, not because they can make money off it but because Trump can. Trump owns a $3.5 billion stake in the company even though he’s never invested in it and can sell that stake any time he wishes. Trump insists he isn’t selling, but more than half of Trump’s net worth of $5.9 billion is tied up in Truth Social, and he’s still burdened by hundreds of millions in debt. The presidency may be the only thing standing between Trump and personal bankruptcy. That reality makes Trump even more susceptible to payoffs of various kinds. “How much Truth Social stock do you own?” could easily become a routine question Trump poses to anybody seeking a political appointment or some other favor. If that’s established to be part of his “official duties,” no prosecutor can touch him. Maybe Trump’s new bestie Elon Musk will buy Truth Social and merge it with Twitter/X. The two platforms aren’t so different, and maybe Trump would agree to stop criticizing EVs in return.
Trump also has a cryptocurrency business, World Liberty Financial (WLF). He doesn’t own it, and neither he nor any family member works for it or sits on its board of directors. As with Truth Social, Trump has not invested in the company. Yet Trump and his family are poised to receive as much as 75 percent of net revenues from the company. When you pay your bribe, don’t forget to make it in WLF tokens!
The Trump International Hotel opened in Washington’s Old Post Office less than two months before the 2016 election, and with Trump’s victory it established the District of Columbia as a latter-day equivalent of Pottersville in It’s A Wonderful Life. Trump paid too much for his lease on this federal building in 2012, lost a fortune on it—and then sold it at a profit in 2022 under mysterious circumstances that I puzzled over two years ago. Some of the mystery cleared up after Forbes reported that Trump lent the new owner $28 million to take it off his hands. By last summer, though, the new owners—of what was now a Waldorf Astoria hotel—had defaulted, and in August the property quietly sold for $100 million at a foreclosure auction.
Since then, Trump has licensed his name to three developments in Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, including a Trump Tower Dubai and an Intercontinental Hotel, sparing the governments of those countries the inconvenience of traveling to the United States to shovel petrodollars down Trump’s pants. The Saudis’ LIV Golf League has already hosted six tournaments at Trump properties and will doubtless now step up the pace.
At the risk of spoiling the party, I must point out one potential bullkill. Josh Chafetz, professor of law at Georgetown and author of a forthcoming Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities article about the Supreme Court and political corruption, noted recently to Adam Liptak of The New York Times that the high court’s definitions of what constitute “official acts” lack consitency. In McDonnell v. United States, a 2016 bribery case involving a corrupt wingnut Virginia governor, Chief Justice John Roberts defined an official act narrowly as “a formal exercise of government power,” and on those grounds he vacated the bribery conviction. But in July’s Trump v. the United States, Roberts defined an official act broadly as anything occurring “within the outer perimeter of … official responsibility,” and on those grounds he shielded Trump from prosecution. The only logic these two definitions shared was the chief justice’s motive not to prosecute corrupt Republican politicians.
The Texas Monthly contacted 100 Republican office holders to get their view of Trump’s plans for deporting millions of immigrants. Only two responded. In Texas, one in 20 residents is an undocumented immigrant. Their absence will have a big economic impact, as will the visuals of rounding up and detaining large numbers of people.
Michael Hardy wrote:
Shortly after he is sworn into office, on January 20, President-elect Donald Trump plans to launch a massive deportation operation targeting the estimated 11.5 million immigrants living illegally in the United States. Texas, with its 1,254-mile southern border and pro-Trump leaders, will play a central role in any such deportations. Stephen Miller, the chief architect of Trump’s immigration policies, has vowed that the administration will build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers,” likely on “open land in Texas near the border.” State land commissioner Dawn Buckingham recently offered the administration 1,400 acres in Starr County about 35 miles west of McAllen to build “deportation facilities.”
In their eagerness to help Trump conduct sweeping roundups of undocumented Texas workers and their families, state leaders who vociferously supported Trump’s candidacy have mostly avoided reckoning with the likely economic consequences of such roundups—including the impact on inflation, a major issue in the presidential campaign.
Earlier this month, Governor Greg Abbott said he expected the president-elect to begin by deporting immigrants who have committed crimes in the United States, but he would not say who he thinks should be expelled next under the far-reaching plan. “President Trump has made perfectly clear that this is a process and you have to have a priority list,” he said. “You begin with . . . the criminals.”
But Texas is home to some 1.6 million undocumented immigrants—around one in every twenty residents—and the vast majority are not criminals. In fact, undocumented immigrants in our state commit crimes at a significantly lower rate than legal residents, according to a National Institute of Justice analysis of Texas Department of Public Safety data. Many among these 1.6 million power the state’s construction, farming, and meatpacking industries and work as housekeepers, landscape gardeners, and restaurant workers.
Deporting every immigrant who is in the U.S. illegally—or even half of them—would cripple the economy. And Texas would be hit harder than most states. A recent report by the left-leaning American Immigration Council estimated that a mass-deportation campaign would reduce the national GDP by 4.2 percent to 6.8 percent—a similar hit to the one the nation took during the Great Recession. The price of groceries would skyrocket. A gallon of milk, for instance, would cost twice as much without immigrant labor, according to a 2015 estimate from Texas A&M University’s AgriLife Extension Service. Mass deportations would also punch a hole in the state budget, because undocumented Texans pay an estimated $4.9 billion in sales and payroll taxes every year,including for retirement benefits they are ineligible to collect.
Trump has argued that deporting undocumented immigrants would open up jobs for American citizens. But the percentage of citizens willing to work in industries such as landscaping and construction has declined, and economic studies suggest that immigration, both legal and illegal, is a net benefit to the economy. Reducing illegal immigration likely would, over time, result in higher wages for legal workers in industries such as construction, assuming the supply of labor were to fall faster than demand. But suddenly removing a significant percentage of undocumented workers (one recent estimate found that 23 percent of construction workers nationally don’t have legal documents) would likely cause hundreds of building projects to stall, crops to go unharvested, and cattle to stack up in feedlots.
Trump’s program would also impose social costs on communities across Texas. According to the Pew Research Center, around 70 percent of undocumented immigrants in the country live in mixed-status households with at least one family member who is here legally. Expelling these migrants would separate families and decimate communities across the state. “The social, family, and economic impact would be very deep,” said Rice University political scientist Tony Payan. “It doesn’t make sense from any perspective. It would be madness for the U.S. to do that.”
Some Texas officials, including Senator Ted Cruz, have long supported mass deportation as a campaign platform while remaining vague about how such an operation would be executed and what the consequences might be for the Texas economy. In an attempt to get more specifics, Texas Monthly reached out to top Texas officials and every Republican state legislator to ask about the incoming president’s mass-deportation plan. We posed four questions:
Do you support President Trump’s plan to deport all immigrants in the country illegally?
How would you like the deportations to be carried out?
Are you concerned about the potential economic damage to the Texas construction, farming, and restaurant industries from deporting undocumented immigrants? If so, how would you remedy that damage?
Are you concerned about the family separations that will occur if all undocumented Texas are deported?
After Trump fired FBI Director James Comey in 2017, he choose respected FBI veteran Christopher Wray to replace Comey. The FBI Director is appointed for a ten-year term, to insulate the Director from partisan influence.
Senator Chuck Grassley is the ranking Republican on the Senate Committee on the Budget.
In this letter, directed to Director Wray, Grassley says he is finished and it’s time to pack his bag. He explains why. The heart of the matter is that he failed to investigate Republican claims that Biden was corrupt, but approved a search of Trump’s home for classified documents.
Next up is the odious Kash Patel, nominated by Trump to be FBI Director. Patel is a MAGA ideologue who has said that if appointed, on day one, he would close the FBI Headquarters and re-open it as a “museum of the deep state.”
Let’s see what Senator Grassley says about the unqualified Patel.
In Houston, Lisa Gray of the Houston Chronicle interviewed Dr. Peter Hotez, a respected practitioner, about the Trump agenda for public health. This is part two of a two-part post.
Gray writes:
Recently, after outlining five terrifying infectious diseases and potential pandemics looming on the world horizon, vaccine researcher Peter Hotez said that he doesn’t believe that the incoming Trump administration is taking those threats seriously enough.
That alarmed me. I’ve been interviewing Hotez since early 2020, right after COVID infections showed up in the United States. As he’s the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, he follows emerging disease threats closely. And with his team at Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, he develops low-cost vaccines for low-income nations. During the pandemic, he became one of the most recognized medical experts on COVID — and a local hero here in Houston.
Videographer Sharon Steinmann and I spoke with Hotez in his office at Baylor. This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Why are you worried that the incoming Trump administration may not be ready for public-health threats on Day 1? Is that based on the people Donald Trump has named to health positions?
A: I’m concerned that the Trump administration is picking individuals based on their ideologies rather than either their subject-matter expertise or their ability to get things done in government.
Q: You’ve been acquainted for years with RFK Jr. — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who Trump has nominated to be secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. How did you meet him?
A: I used to call him “Bobby.” I got to know him because in 2017 he indicated that he was going to head a vaccine commission for the new incoming Trump administration.
I was in my office, here where we’re speaking now, and my assistant said, “Hey, Dr. Hotez, I have Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins on the phone. Can you talk to them?”
Q: Whoa! Those are two big names in your field.
A: [Grins.] I said, “Yeah, I guess I’ll take the call.”
They said, “Peter, we’ve got a job for you. If anyone can explain to Kennedy why vaccines don’t cause autism, it’s you.”
They asked because I was a scientist and a pediatrician, and most importantly, I’d written a book, “Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism,” explaining how I can be sure that my daughter’s autism is not linked to vaccines.
Tim Shriver, a terrific guy who heads the Special Olympics, brokered a meeting for us with RFK Jr. And for months after that, I had a number of long, long phone conversations with Bobby. Sometimes that would be while my wife Ann and I were out for a long walk through Montrose, and she’d listen in.
Q: How did that go?
A: Our conversations weren’t very productive. It was an exercise in frustration, probably for both of us. He was pretty dug in. Either he didn’t understand the science or he didn’t have a lot of interest in it.
For instance, I would point out to Bobby that autism is a neurodevelopmental condition that starts early in pregnancy. We know this from multiple neurodevelopmental studies. So autism is well in motion before kids ever even see their first vaccine.
In addition to that, the Broad Institute, at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had also identified at least a hundred autism genes. Many of them are a type of gene called the neuronal cytoskeleton gene, which is involved in neuronal connections. (My wife Ann and I actually did a whole-genome sequencing on Rachel. We found that Rachel’s autism gene is different from the ones published by the Broad Institute, but it’s similar — it’s a neuronal cytoskeleton gene.)
Sergiu Pasca and his associates at Stanford University Medical School have also looked at what they call brain organoids. They can put neurons together in a petri dish and basically assemble them as mini-brains. This has been done now with neurons that have autism genes, and so the aberrant neuronal patterns really tell the complete story now.
It was frustrating to me that Bobby didn’t pay attention to the science and instead spouted dogma.
A: I got to know her during the COVID pandemic. She was a Fox News talking head, and I was going on Fox News pretty regularly in the evenings until I wouldn’t go along with the hydroxychloroquinine nonsense.
At the time, we talking heads on the various news channels would talk to each other. That was helpful because we were learning from each other. We all brought different expertise to the table.
Dr. Nesheiwat had a lot of humility. She wanted to know my opinion on COVID vaccines, how they worked and what were the different technologies. She was inquisitive and delightful to talk with. So I’m excited about her role as surgeon general. That’s at least one silver lining.
Q: Are there other silver linings?
A: Yeah. The other person that I got to know during the pandemic was Mehmet Oz, Dr. Oz, because he had a show with wide reach. I would go on his show and talk about COVID vaccines.
I liked being on his show. He was respectful and thoughtful. He asked good questions and gave me an opportunity to talk to daytime audiences — people I wouldn’t ordinarily reach. I was grateful for that opportunity.
I think that both Dr. Nesheiwat and Dr. Oz are effective communicators. I think President-elect Trump wants to bring on good communicators.
Dr. Oz is heading a very bureaucratic organization, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. I don’t think that’s a perfect fit for him — he’d have been better off as something like surgeon general — but we’ll see.
Lisa Gray is the op-ed editor and a member of the Houston Chronicle editorial board. During the pandemic, she was the Chronicle’s lead COVID reporter.
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