Attention to the Unseen

Joe Jaworski writes: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has spent his eight-year incumbency living on the political edge of scandal, was just acquitted in his historic Texas Senate impeachment trial. The Texas Senate voted largely along party lines, with only two Republican senators bravely voting to convict on virtually all sixteen articles of impeachment. The Texas Constitution requires a supermajority vote to convict on any article of impeachment, and the impeachment prosecutors came up short on each article. Kudos…

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Politico reports: Former President Donald Trump said Sunday that he didn’t respect lawyers and members of his campaign who told him he lost the 2020 presidential election, and that it was his decision to buy into the theory that the election was rigged. “In many cases, I didn’t respect them,” Trump said during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” when asked why he decided to ignore his lawyers and advisers who told him he lost the 2020 election to…

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Ankush Khardori writes: The public debate over the applicability of the [14th] amendment kicked into high gear following the release last month of a law-review article written by William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, two conservative constitutional law professors who argue that, under an originalist interpretation of the provision, Trump is barred from running for office. The notion picked up steam in some quarters of the press, as well as an endorsement from two prominent legal thinkers, but it has since drawn vocal objections from the right…

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The 1st Amendment doesn’t protect witness intimidation, jury tampering, or threats to the presiding judge or the prosecution The narrowly tailored gag order that Special Counsel Smith has requested is well within the U.S. Constitution’s limits. About time!https://t.co/nXz0EQzXim — Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ (@tribelaw) September 15, 2023 Jack Smith was smart to put Trump’s misconduct in front of the judge. She is not going to like it, and it certainly won’t make her more inclined to rule in his favor….

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The Guardian reports: Jenna Ellis – the Donald Trump lawyer who like the former president faces criminal charges regarding attempted election subversion in his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020 – says she will not vote for him in the future because he is a “malignant narcissist” who cannot admit mistakes. “I simply can’t support him for elected office again,” Ellis said. “Why I have chosen to distance is because of that frankly malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that…

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The Guardian reports: The Coffee county board of elections in Georgia held its first meeting on Tuesday after being mentioned more than 50 times in Fulton county’s indictment of Donald Trump and 18 others for allegedly participating in a criminal conspiracy to change the outcome of the 2020 election. Local residents, still frustrated over a lack of accountability for officials who may have known about the conspiracy, pressured the reluctant board for an independent investigation. The small, rural county 200…

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Andrew Gawthorpe writes: If you need a reminder that the Republican party’s problem with democracy extends beyond the antics of Donald Trump, look no further than Wisconsin. A battle is under way there which began before the January 6 insurrection was even a twinkle in Trump’s eye, and which will do much to determine the future of democracy in America whether Trump ultimately answers for his crimes or not. It’s no exaggeration to say that Wisconsin and its state capitol,…

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The Guardian reports: Wisconsin’s top elections official suffered another blow on Thursday when the Republican-controlled state senate voted to fire her by a party line vote of 22 to 11. Meagan Wolfe’s status as elections administrator will now likely be determined in court. Legal experts and the Wisconsin attorney general have disputed the move by Republican senators to remove Wolfe, a respected and accomplished non-partisan leader. Her removal would affect the administration of elections in 2024 and illustrates the increasingly…

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NBC News reports: The judge presiding over the federal criminal case alleging Donald Trump willfully mishandled national security secrets issued an order Wednesday limiting the former president’s access to the evidence while also barring him from publicly discussing sensitive material. The 16-page order from U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon is largely in line with a proposal submitted by special counsel Jack Smith’s team in July for how national security information at the center of the case should be handled by…

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CNN reports: A liberal group filed a lawsuit Tuesday to block former President Donald Trump from the 2024 presidential ballot in Minnesota, the second major lawsuit in two weeks that hopes to invoke the 14th Amendment’s arcane “insurrectionist ban.” The cases are seen as legal long shots. Trump denies wrongdoing and has vowed to fight to remain on the presidential ballot. The new Minnesota lawsuit was filed in state court by Free Speech For People, one week after another group…

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Politico reports: Joe Biden has a literal Trump card to play against the House’s new impeachment inquiry. In January 2020, the Donald Trump-led Justice Department formally declared that impeachment inquiries by the House are invalid unless the chamber takes formal votes to authorize them. That opinion — issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — came in response to then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to launch an impeachment inquiry into Trump without initially holding a vote for it….

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Noah Bookbinder and Donald K. Sherman write: Donald Trump currently faces four criminal prosecutions, a momentous and historic fact that can hardly be overstated. But a civil suit brought this week by six courageous residents of Colorado is another important step in the quest to preserve the viability of our democracy. The suit, filed on Sept. 6 in Colorado District Court by Republican and unaffiliated voters, seeks to compel Colorado’s secretary of state to bar Trump from the state’s ballot,…

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The New York Times reports: In a motion filed in Federal District Court in Washington, John F. Lauro, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, cited statements Judge Chutkan had made about the former president at hearings for two defendants facing sentencing for crimes they committed at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. At one of the hearings, in October 2022, Judge Chutkan told the defendant, Christine Priola, a former occupational therapist in the Cleveland school system, that the people who “mobbed”…

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Politico reports: The fundamentals of the 2024 campaign are still taking shape, but one thing is already clear: A flurry of court actions might cost Republicans the House majority. In the past nine days, state and federal judges threw out two congressional maps — and helped Democrats avoid a worst-case scenario in Ohio — kicking off an unusually busy redistricting calendar heading into the election year. All told, a dozen or more seats across at least six states could be…

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