House conservatives are pressuring Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) for a vote on legislation aimed at showing their allegiance to former President Trump after his historic criminal conviction, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: Trump's House allies are prepping a full-throttled defense of the ex-president, including going after the Justice Department — a move that could put the party's vulnerable members in a difficult spot.

Conservatives want a floor vote on a bill that would allow current or former presidents to move any state case brought against them — such as the one in New York that resulted in Trump's conviction — to federal court, according to multiple House Republican sources.

Meanwhile, Johnson told Republicans in a conference meeting Tuesday that the House GOP will target DOJ through attempts at increased oversight, funding cuts and other means, according to a source in the room.

Dr. Harmony Schroeder figured she had 10 more years of seeing patients and delivering babies at OGA Women’s Health Clinic in Meridian before she retired and moved to McCall, where she sees patients a few times a month.

But that changed two years ago.

When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in summer 2022 and handed abortion regulations back to the states, Schroeder and many other doctors in Idaho began to wonder what their futures would look like in Idaho as strict trigger laws banning abortion took effect.

For Schroeder, it was too much. She and her family decided to relocate to Washington — where Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee has criticized Idaho abortion policies — after months of heartrending discussion.

“I have a lot of attachment to Idaho,” Schroeder told the Idaho Statesman in a phone interview. “I have a lot of friends here. I have a long, long history (with) my patients here. It was an incredibly painful and hard decision to make.”

Last month, she sent letters and emails to about 3,000 patients, letting them know she would be leaving after 20 years at the practice.

Mike Sacks
@MikeSacksEsq

The 5th Circuit (Trump, Trump, GWB) throws out a Biden admin rule to prevent private fund advisors from defrauding investors, says Dodd-Frank did not give SEC the authority to regulate private fund investors and advisors https://ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/23/23-60471CV0.pdf

Justice Samuel Alito is enmeshed in a scandal that, typical of this political era, is in equal measure unsettling and absurd. Last month, the New York Times reported that for several days in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, the Alito family flew an upside-down American flag outside of their home in Alexandria, Virginia. The flag was widely used at the time by supporters of President Donald Trump who believed the 2020 election was stolen. Shortly after, the Times also reported that the Alitos flew an “Appeal to Heaven” flag—another flag commonly used by fringe elements of the American right—at their New Jersey beach house just last year.

From a legal perspective, this all posed the question of whether Alito should recuse himself from the various cases concerning January 6 and Trump’s attempt to illegally seize the presidency in 2020, some of which are pending before the Court now and some of which will be soon enough. In late May, Democratic Senators Dick Durbin and Sheldon Whitehouse wrote to Chief Justice John Roberts, requesting Alito’s recusal from those cases.

Alito has refused to recuse. He says that the flags were put up by his wife, who, he told the Times, raised the upside-down flag in response to neighbors who had displayed profane anti-Trump signs.

This explanation is, of course, ridiculous. There is no plausible reason that someone in January 2021 would raise an upside-down American flag in order to signal some sort of generic disapproval toward an angry neighbor. At that time, in this country, at a Republican’s house, displaying the flag carried by January 6 rioters a few weeks earlier meant exactly one thing.

Merrick Garland has staked his career at the Department of Justice on being an independent attorney general.

He has tapped three special counsels to investigate President Joe Biden — the man who nominated him — his son Hunter Biden and former President Donald Trump. He has charged more than 1,200 Jan. 6 defendants. He even navigated the discovery of classified documents at the home of former Vice President Mike Pence, for which he opted not to appoint a prosecutor, and ultimately decided to file no charges.

But rather than being revered as a straight shooter, Garland has become reviled. He is a man alone on an island in Washington, taking unyielding blowback from the right and left. On Capitol Hill Tuesday, he seemed to have finally had enough.

“I will not be intimidated. And the Justice Department will not be intimidated,” Garland told Republican members of the House Oversight Committee as he set out to defend himself and the department against Republicans’ attacks.

At a moment when Trump is calling the criminal justice system into question following his conviction by a Manhattan jury, Garland’s insistence that the system is on the level was particularly striking. And he made no bones about the severity with which he viewed Republicans’ attacks.

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — The Texas governor's pardon of a former Army sergeant who fatally shot a Black Lives Matter demonstrator undermines the state's legal system and constitution and should be reversed, a prosecutor said Tuesday.

Travis County District Attorney José Garza said he is filing request with the Court of Criminal Appeals — the state's highest criminal court — to review the pardon issued by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, which he said made a mockery of the legal system and put politics ahead of justice.

“We will continue to use the legal process to seek justice,” Garza said during a news conference in Austin.

Daniel Perry shot and killed Garrett Foster during a protest in downtown Austin in July 2020. Perry was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison in May 2023, prompting immediate calls for a pardon from conservative figures. Abbott issued the pardon last month and Perry was quickly released from prison.

The quick pardon undermined an established appeals process that was available to Perry, and violated state constitutional separation of powers, Garza said.

Abbott’s office did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.

President Joe Biden’s climate agenda got a surprise endorsement Tuesday from the leader of one of the world’s largest oil companies.

The bipartisan infrastructure law and Inflation Reduction Act “seem to be working in terms of attracting a significant amount of capital in different states, whether it’s a red or blue state,” Shell’s chief executive, Wael Sawan, said at an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a centrist think tank.

“You’re creating jobs. You’re actually starting to anchor new industries. And over time, what you will do is you will create supply chains locally that are able to satisfy the demands of many of these industries,” he added. “That’s all good.”

Sawan’s comments aren’t completely unexpected. Shell broke away from the broader oil industry to advocate in favor of the IRA, which Democrats passed without any Republican votes. And some industry groups that initially opposed it have now vowed to protect the clean energy portions of the law from a potential GOP assault.

But the oil executive’s robust defense of U.S. climate policy is still striking in light of the looming elections, where control of the White House and Congress are up for grabs. Biden is running for reelection against former President Donald Trump, who has courted oil industry donors with promises to slash the Biden administration’s tax credits for electric vehicles and wind power and expand drilling on federal lands.

The laws for North Carolinians seeking to take a pill to end a pregnancy are changing.

A federal judge issued her final ruling Monday in a lawsuit by an OB-GYN challenging state regulations on medication abortion.

The ruling marks the potential end of a months-long lawsuit and means:

▪ Mifepristone does not need to be taken in a clinical setting and can be taken in one’s own home.

▪ The pill can be provided by pharmacies and not solely by licensed physicians.

▪ A follow-up appointment is not required, but an advance consultation is.

Here’s a look at what else the ruling means.

What was the lawsuit about?

The lawsuit was filed by Dr. Amy Bryant of UNC Health in January 2023. This is the same month that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a protocol for certified pharmacies to provide mifepristone directly to patients.

This approval opened access to the drug for people beyond clinical settings and for delivery by a mail-order pharmacy with a valid prescription. Mifepristone is the first part of a two-pill regimen for the termination of a pregnancy within the first 10 weeks of gestation.

Bryant challenged the state’s regulations on mifepristone. More specifically, she challenged state laws in place around prescribing the pill, such as requiring doctors to provide the pill in-person at certified facilities, and after a 72-hour waiting period.

She argued that the FDA’s usage requirements, which are more lenient than state laws, preempt North Carolina’s restrictions.

An aerial shot of The Greenbrier, a West Virginia resort where a Koch-funded group has hosted more than a dozen federal judges for educational retreats. Steve Helber via Associated Press


Buried in the April 2022 ruling that struck down the Biden administration’s mask mandate was a section that was unusual for a court decision.

The outcome itself was far from surprising. Places all over the country were dropping local mask requirements, and the judge hearing this case — a challenge to the federal mandate to mask on planes and other public transportation — was a conservative Trump appointee, U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle for the Middle District of Florida. Mizelle ruled that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s mask requirement overstepped the agency’s legal authority.

What was eye-catching was her explanation of why. In her ruling, Mizelle wrote she had consulted the Corpus of Historical American English, an academic search engine that returns examples of how words and phrases are used in select historical texts. Mizelle searched “sanitation,” a crucial word in the 1944 statute that authorizes the CDC to issue disease-prevention rules, and found it generally was used to describe the act of making something clean. “Wearing a mask,” she wrote, “cleans nothing.”

Searching large linguistic databases is a relatively new approach to judicial analysis called legal corpus linguistics. Although it has gained in popularity over the last decade, it is barely discussed outside of an enthusiastic group of right-wing conservative legal scholars. Which raises the question: How did this niche concept wind up driving such a consequential decision in the country’s health policy?

Now, new disclosures seen by HuffPost shed some light. Just weeks before she issued the ruling, Mizelle had discreetly attended an all-expenses-paid luxury trip from a conservative group whose primary mission is to persuade more federal judges to adopt the use of corpus linguistics. For five days, Mizelle and more than a dozen other federal judges listened to the leading proponents of corpus linguistics in the comfort of The Greenbrier, an ostentatious resort spread out over 11,000 acres of West Virginia hillside.

The 2024 elections in Arizona could mark a pivotal turning point.

Republicans in the Arizona Legislature hold narrow one-seat majorities in both the state House of Representatives and the state Senate.

With every lawmaker in Arizona on the ballot, Democrats could win control of a chamber of the state Legislature for the first time in more than three decades. Democrat Katie Hobbs holds the Governor's Office, meaning they could also win total control over state government for the first time since 1966.

Republicans could also retain one of both legislative chambers, ensuring divided government through 2026, when Hobbs is eligible to seek reelection.

Voters will also be asked to settle policy questions pivotal to Arizona's future. The extension of a half-cent sales tax to pay for a mix of transportation projects has already qualified for the ballot, while a constitutional amendment enshrining abortion rights into the state constitution appears poised to go before voters.