Category: Law & Crime

AZ Central – The Arizona Republic – Opinion

Trump isn’t the real threat to democracy. Christian nationalism is

Herb Paine – December 26, 2023

Less than a year away from what is surely the most fateful presidential election in American history, warnings about the threats to democracy associated with right-wing extremism and Trumpist authoritarianism dominate media’s attention.

Meanwhile, at the local level, a related movement, Christian nationalism, constitutes an equally serious creeping threat to democracy, pluralism and diversity.

Its driving force is the National Association of Christian Lawmakers.

NACL claims to ‘bring Godly change’

NACL’s mission is to “formulate model statutes, ordinances and resolutions based upon a biblical worldview for introduction in cities, states and the Federal government.”

NACL now has a legislative presence in more than 30 states, including Arizona, participating in the drafting of model legislation “to reestablish and protect conservative values in America.”

NACL’s initiatives to Christianize the nation and merge church and state (essentially dismissing the Constitution’s Establishment Clause) are inspired by Christian dominionism.

Its principles are “a world-changing strategy” to “bring Godly change” to America by transforming seven spheres of societal influence: religion, family education, government, media, arts and entertainment, and business.

As this year closes, the evidence grows that state legislatures and local school boards are the fronts on which the movement’s anti-constitutional and anti-democratic policies are being pursued.

How legislation played out in Arizona

In Arizona, the NACL’s objectives are reflected in a pattern of state policy initiatives that extend as far back as 2018 when Senate Bill 1289, modeled after the National Motto Display Act, established “Ditat Deus” (“God enriches”) as Arizona’s state motto.

That may sound benign, but, as a result, whenever ADOT sells an In God We Trust license plate, $17 goes to the Scottsdale-based Alliance Defending Freedom, an anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ+ organization that files lawsuits to enshrine Christianity in government and jurisprudence.

In 2022, House lawmakers proposed House Bill 2507, a bill that the ACLU describes as “religious exemptions on steroids.”

It would a) “give religious organizations blanket immunity from all civil and criminal liability, as long as they claim to be exercising their faith while engaging in the unlawful conduct” and b) forbid the government from imposing fees, penalties, injunctions or damages against these entities.

This year, Rep. David Livingston, who serves as chairman of Arizona NACL, along with 34 other lawmakers, sponsored SB 1600, which would criminalize an abortion clinic, hospital or medical practitioner who fails to “take all medically appropriate and reasonable actions to preserve the life and health of the infant who is born alive,” regardless the newborn’s likelihood of survival.

They pushed book, transgender sports bans

In 2022, lawmakers passed SB 1164, last year’s variation of NACL’s model Heartbeat Bill, that bans abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. It makes exceptions for medical emergencies but not for rape or incest.

The constitutionality of that bill is now before the state Supreme Court. However the court decides, the movement’s efforts to intrude upon a woman’s health and family planning choices will continue.

This year’s NACL legislative agenda corresponds to Civics Alliance’s “American Birthright Movement,” which prioritizes a curriculum that exalts America’s past as a Christian nation, its exceptionalism and its achievements, without reference to the nation’s history of repression and exploitation.

When real atheists: Take on fake Christians

Accordingly, Livingston and his fellow legislators introduced measures to:

• expand school vouchers for religious schools;
• ban transgender girls and women from participating in girls’/women’s sports teams;
• ban books in schools that discuss sexuality or race;
• require schools to disclose information that could “out” LGBTQ+ students to their parents.

They have also introduced or passed legislation to undermine ethical investing strategies by corporations that address racial and gender equality and reproductive rights.

What’s next on Christian nationalist agenda

All these initiatives are a precursor of what is yet to come.

Pending actions include:

• an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to recognize America’s Christian heritage;
• the reinstatement of prayer in public schools;
• the enshrinement of a “Christian nationalist interpretation” of American history in school curricula;
• immigration restrictions; and
• stronger governmental actions to restrict “immoral behavior.”

This Christian nationalism agenda is unfolding at school boards throughout the country and in the Phoenix area.

For example, the contract renewals of two teachers in the Peoria Unified School District were challenged earlier this year:

One was on the grounds that the teacher had presented her high school science students with sexually explicit material in the form of a PowerPoint (in fact, information about reproduction in a biology class).

The second had encouraged students and staff to wear transgender colors to celebrate the International Transgender Day of Visibility.

History has revealed the ability of small but tenacious and single-minded groups to overtake the majority.

We are compelled, therefore, amid a global anti-democratic trend, to be vigilant, speak out and vote!

Herb Paine is president of Paine Consulting Services, a social and political commentator, and former congressional candidate. 

TPM

Dictator On Day One: The Executive Orders That Trump Would Issue From The Start

Josh Kovensky – December 26, 2023

Donald Trump has said that he would be a “dictator” on his first day in office.

And a review of his campaign’s plans and messaging shows part of what that may mean: a sweeping range of day-one executive orders aimed at remaking the Constitution and the federal government as we know it.

On his first days in office, Trump is planning on issuing orders which would end birthright citizenship, give himself the authority to fire tens of thousands of federal civil servants, and force federal bureaucrats to obey culture war dictates.

Through executive action, Trump plans to proclaim extreme new interpretations of baseline provisions of the Constitution, dramatically expanding the reach of presidential authority while upturning principles of law and American society, like birthright citizenship, that for decades have been taken for granted. Many of the proposed orders are likely to spark court fights, setting up legal battles over bedrock issues destined for a 6-3 conservative Supreme Court.

Other proposed day-one orders lean into the culture wars with real-world consequences, like one which would bar federal agencies from running programs supporting gender-transition education. Another, less seriously, would reinstate Trump’s vaunted “National Garden of American Heroes,” a park which would feature sculptures of Irving Berlin, William F. Buckley, Abraham Lincoln, Alex Trebek, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Shirley Temple, and others.

There isn’t anything new about presidents issuing rafts of executive orders on their first day in office. But while new administrations typically issue orders which set new policy and proclaim the values of the new presidency, what distinguishes the Trump plans is the ambition of what he’s proposing.

“The substance and content of some of these proposals go far beyond what presidents have done with executive orders,” Blake Emerson, a law professor at UCLA who studies executive power, told TPM.

The proposed orders come in several buckets:

• Executive orders which strike at key constitutional questions
• Reissuing and expanding executive orders from his first term
• Culture war proclamations
• Rescinding Biden-era executive orders

A Trump campaign spokesman did not return TPM’s request for comment.

Trump’s campaign, along with a cottage industry of MAGA think tanks, have laid out what they believe his day-one agenda should be in part through what they call Agenda47, the closest thing the Trump campaign has to a platform.

At the center is the most extreme measure: an executive order aimed at rescinding birthright citizenship.

The Trump campaign describes the proposal in conclusive language, saying that they’ve already arrived at the “correct interpretation” of the 14th Amendment. Under that interpretation, to be described in a day-one executive order, the children of undocumented immigrants and tourists would no longer receive citizenship. Federal agencies, like the Social Security Administration, would be ordered to stop issuing passports, social security numbers, and other markers of citizenship under the order.

“They must go back,” Trump said in a statement accompanying the announcement, referring to the children of illegal immigrants.

The order would likely be met with near-instantaneous legal challenges, but, Emerson said, would be “unprecedented” in its use of executive power: having the White House proclaim, literally by fiat, a new interpretation of the Constitution.

“He can’t change the Constitution with an exec order,” John Woolley, a professor at UC-Santa Barbara who studies executive orders, told TPM. “But he can make things difficult.”

Trump has committed to a number of culture war executive orders as well. One would ban gender transition education in federal agencies, another would ban “ESG investments,” yet another would reverse a Biden executive order promoting diversity. One proposal from the Heritage Foundation-backed Project 2025 envisions an order banning government programs from supporting the teaching of “critical race theory.”

These may seem like ill-defined values statements, but Trump has said that he would issue another order on day one: a broadened version of his Schedule F proclamation from late 2020. In non-legalese, that’s an executive order which would empower him to fire any federal civil servant with policymaking responsibilities for any reason; a category of people which reaches into the tens of thousands.

Trump has framed it as a plan to “shatter the deep state” on the first day, an explicitly political undertaking.

The result, some civil service experts say, could be the mass exodus of professionals. That would lead to some politicization, but, more swiftly, a decapitation of the functioning of several government agencies.

It’s genuinely unclear from the plans that the Trump campaign has released which government functions they want preserved, in order to use for their own ends, and which they want incapacitated.

One promised day-one executive order, for example, calls for a reinterpretation of the 1974 Congressional Budget Control and Impoundment Act, a bedrock law to the modern budgeting system which, among other things, mandates that the executive branch use funding allocated by the legislative.

Trump himself ran afoul of this law in 2019, when he withheld money that Congress allocated to Ukraine as part of a political extortion scheme to coerce Kyiv into damaging Trump’s then-opponent, Joe Biden. Now, he’s proposing to order federal agencies to use the law to identify where programs can be cut, and push to “overturn the limits” that the law places on the executive.

Other plans, including one put out by the Heritage Foundation, would see Trump issue a day-one executive order gutting the Environmental Protection Administration. That would include “explicit language requiring reconsideration of the agency’s structure with reference to fulfilling its mission to create a better environmental tomorrow with clean air, safe water, healthy soil, and thriving communities.”

Many of these proposals would likely run into a buzzsaw of litigation. Federal employees, their unions, and good government groups would sue to block some of them from going into effect.

But in the meantime, Trump would likely be able to unleash massive shifts in policy. One proposal, for example, would ban the federal government from supporting efforts to fight “dis” or “mis” information; another would bring back the travel ban on Muslim countries.

Emerson, the UCLA professor, said that many of them appear to work in tandem. He described the civil service firing order, for example, to TPM as a one-two punch: executive orders which lay out bans on right-wing culture war hobbyhorses, and an executive order with the muscle to fire people who disobey.

“You have a really potent combination where people could be getting fired from civil service posts because they’re not toeing the line on critical race theory, or what have you,” Emerson said.

Slate

That New Trump Phone-Call Recording Sounds Pretty Bad, Huh?

Shirin Ali – December 26, 2023

“If you can go home tonight, do not sign it. … We will get you attorneys.” —Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, on a Nov. 17, 2020, phone call with two Republican officials about not certifying their county’s presidential election results

It seems there’s a sequel to Trump’s infamous “perfect phone call.” Last week, the Detroit News published a recording of a November 2020 phone call Trump made to local Michigan Republican officials, pressuring them not to certify their county’s election results.

RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel was also on the line, pushing Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, two GOP canvassers for Michigan’s Wayne County—which includes Detroit—to reject the certification minutes after they attended a canvassers meeting. Both Palmer and Hartmann did not sign the official statement of votes for Wayne County and later tried to rescind their votes in favor of certification but failed. In the end, Wayne County overwhelmingly voted in Joe Biden, with 68 percent of the vote.

While we did already know about this call—the basic facts of it came to light when Palmer testified to the Jan. 6 committee in 2021—the details of what exactly Trump and McDaniel said weren’t known until now.

In Palmer’s testimony to the House Select Committee, she said she didn’t remember exactly what Trump told her or if he had mentioned anything about Michigan’s election. In the newly published recording, however, Trump claims there were more votes in those counties than people, and that “everybody knows Detroit is crooked as hell.” Michigan’s election director, Jonathan Brater, said that was categorically false in a December 2020 affidavit, that in fact there were “fewer ballots tabulated than names in the poll books.”

The new details raise questions about whether Jack Smith could use this to strengthen his federal election interference case, or whether Trump could face state charges in Michigan, where officials have been conducting their own election interference investigation, similar to what Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis did in Georgia.

Former Trump lawyer Ty Cobb told Politico the phone call shows “the depths to which Trump personally participated in fraudulently pimping the ‘Big Lie.’ ”

Michigan did ultimately send a fake certificate to the National Archives and Congress claiming that Trump won the state’s 2020 election—and 16 Republicans face felony charges for signing on to it.

This phone call echoes the infamous conversation in which Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find “11,779” votes to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory—the one he’s defended as “an absolutely PERFECT phone call.” (Trump now faces 13 state felony charges for allegedly trying to overturn Georgia’s election results.) Then there’s the phone call Trump had with Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, in which he also pressured the governor to claim there had been voter fraud so Arizona’s election results could be overturned in his favor.

Karl Rove, a former adviser for the George W. Bush administration, told Fox News that Trump’s actions on this Michigan phone call are “what we would call election interference” and that the former president could face a situation that is similar to what he’s currently dealing with in Georgia. Rove also speculated that McDaniel might face legal ramifications. “I think that was highly inappropriate.”