GOP Judges Strike Down Far-Right Religious Liberty Training Punishment

Lawyers representing Southwest Airlines no longer have to undergo “religious liberty training” from a far-right Christian hate group, a federal appeals court ruled Friday, overturning a ruling from August. 

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that the training would likely violate the lawyers’ constitutional rights and exceed the court’s authority. Three Republican judges sat on the panel making the decision, two of whom were appointed by Donald Trump.

Last year, a federal judge in Texas appointed by Trump ordered three senior lawyers for the airline to take eight hours of training from the Alliance Defending Freedom as part of sanctions resulting from a religious discrimination lawsuit brought by a former flight attendant.

The attendant, Charlene Carter, sued Southwest for firing her in 2017 after she sent anti-abortion messages to her union’s former president. Carter argued she had been discriminated against based on her religious beliefs, and U.S. District Judge Brantley Starr ruled in her favor, ordering she be reinstated. Starr also ordered Southwest to issue a statement to its employees saying that the airline “may not” engage in religious discrimination against them.

When Southwest said that it “does not” do so, Carter demanded additional sanctions against the company, to which Starr responded by requiring the religious liberty training. Why Starr brought in the ADF is unclear, as they weren’t representing Carter and had no involvement in the case whatsoever.

The Alliance Defending Freedom is designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for advocating laws promoting discrimination against LBGTQ people. ADF recently represented the plaintiff in the Supreme Court case 303 Creative v. Elenis, where a web designer sued to have the right to refuse services to LGBTQ people based on an entirely fabricated premise. The group has also fought against reproductive rights, helping to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Charlatan Comer was caught yet again doing something he’s criticized Biden for. In a desperate attempt to impeach Biden, the House Oversight chair has long accused Biden of using pseudonymous emails to dodge public records and help obscure his involvement in his messy son’s chaos. In a pristine example of “every accusation is a confession” theory, it turns out Comer did exactly that.

While serving as Kentucky’s commissioner of agriculture, Comer sent numerous emails using pseudonyms. Two Kentucky government email accounts named for Comer’s son, Harlan—who at the time was just 7 years old—were uncovered by The Daily Beast during a records request related to Comer’s 2014 marijuana mishap exposed earlier this week.

One email to an aide with the Kentucky Department of Agriculture purportedly sent from the 7-year-old reads, “I’ll touch base with you today about Hemp. Some things have happened over night [sic] with respect to hemp so we may be growing it this year.” Though kids sometimes pick up odd hobbies, The New Republic was unable to find any evidence that Harlan was growing hemp in his early childhood, let alone sending emails to state agencies.

Other emails were signed to “Jamie”—an incredibly uninventive pseudonym for someone who has gone by Jamie throughout his life—with an automated “Sent from my iPhone” signature. A spokesperson for Comer rebuffed queries into the emails, claiming all of Comer’s emails were “monitored and maintained” by staff, which naturally begs the question as to why staff for Comer were handling emails related to his private business dealings with a Chinese company.

“As the Commissioner of Agriculture, Congressman Comer’s email accounts were solely monitored and maintained by staff,” the unnamed spokesperson told The Daily Beast. “All communications are publicly available through the Kentucky Open Records Act.”

Given his lackluster aptitude for creativity, it’s no wonder Comer reached so close to home to find things to lob at Biden. If that’s the case, we can reasonably expect to hear Comer claim Biden abused his college girlfriend.

Not even California Representative Nancy Pelosi believes that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should address Congress.

Speaking to CNN on Friday, the former House speaker said that it was “wrong” to invite Netanyahu, and that she would “absolutely not” have invited him if she were still leading the chamber.

“Frankly, I didn’t approve of his being invited the last time, but the Speaker just on his own invited him without consulting the rest of the leadership,” Pelosi said, recalling when former House Speaker John Boehner called on Netanyahu to address Congress in 2015. “And he came, and he criticized President Obama for the masterful work that he had done with the nuclear agreement regarding Iran to stop them from developing a nuclear weapon.

“And I thought it was completely inappropriate,” she continued. “I feel very sad that he has been invited. But who knows, by then will he still be prime minister?”

“Everything I read is they’re unhappy about this, they’re unhappy about that,” Pelosi said, referring to Benny Gantz, the Israeli minister without portfolio who has given Netanyahu an ultimatum: Adopt Gantz’s party’s objectives by Saturday or witness the National Unity Party’s exit from government. “I wish that he would be a statesman and do what is right for Israel.”

Pelosi then quickly rotated through her usual positions on the conflict: advocating for a two-state solution, decrying Hamas as a “terrorist organization” that is “dedicated to the destruction of Israel,” and lamenting that the hostages are not free and that the “people of Gaza are suffering.”

“We need to help them and not have him stand in the way of that for such a long time,” Pelosi said. “I think it’s going to invite more of what we have seen in terms of discontent among our own people about what’s happening there.”

Pelosi’s comments are a surprising shift for the California Democrat, who has been unyielding in her support for Israel. In January, she came under fire for accusing pro-Palestine protesters of having ties to Russia and the Kremlin.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas amended his previous financial disclosures Friday, retroactively acknowledging that the lavish trips he had taken in 2019 were financed by the Republican megadonor, billionaire real estate developer, and Nazi memorabilia collector Harlan Crow.

The expenses were first revealed last year in a series of investigations by ProPublica that found the conservative justice had been pocketing favors from Crow in a number of ways, including private school tuition for his nephew; the renovation of the home where his mother still lives; and undisclosed trips on the billionaire’s yacht, private jet, and at his private resort.

The annual financial disclosures are one of the few insights into the private lives of the nation’s highest judiciary. In his 2023 report, Thomas included an unusual addendum, defending his decision to accept luxurious gifts from Crow while admitting that he had “inadvertently omitted” details about the favors on his previous disclosures, blaming the leaked Roe v. Wade decision for his reasoning to avoid commercial air travel.

“Because of the increased security risk following the Dobbs opinion leak, the May flights were by private plane for official travel as filer’s security detail recommended noncommercial travel whenever possible,” Thomas wrote at the time.

The court, which had long avoided the kinds of formal ethics regulations imposed on lower courts due to its special constitutional status, implemented its first ethics code in November—in part to respond to public scrutiny over the undocumented gifts embraced by Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito, who failed to report a luxury fishing vacation to Alaska with hedge fund billionaire ​​Paul Singer in 2008.

A new analysis of Representative Nancy Mace’s finances reveals that the South Carolina Republican overcharged Congress thousands of dollars to cover housing expenses on her $1.6 million Washington, D.C., townhouse.

Mace was accused of “secretly fleecing taxpayers” in an ethics complaint filed earlier this week, alleging she sought higher monthly lodging reimbursements than what was actually warranted per her expenses.

A closer analysis of bills from her home—including Washington Gas, Pepco water, Xfinity internet, insurance, and taxes—indicates that Mace charged the government for more than $8,900 over what she was eligible for, reported Punchbowl News.

In a statement to Punchbowl News, Mace’s communications director Gabrielle Lipsky said that the representative’s office follows “all the rules for reimbursements” and “returned over $300,000 in taxpayer dollars from our office budget last year.”

Mace’s former staffers gladly dished the dirt on her, though, disclosing to The Washington Post last week that Mace repeatedly directed her team to file for reimbursements to the tune of $2,000 a month, despite being informed by people involved in her office finances that she could not justify claiming more than $1,726 a month. During some months of the year, she filed to be reimbursed upward of $3,000—nearly double what her team had calculated.

“Representative Mace has violated House Ethics Rules by repeatedly seeking reimbursement for lodging in excess of the actual monthly expense of maintaining her co-owned townhouse in  Washington, D.C., resulting in a misuse of taxpayer funds for purposes unrelated to her official duties,” read a copy of the ethics complaint.

Mace’s requests violated two key rules of a congressional reimbursement program, according to the complaint: Lawmakers cannot be repaid for interest or principal on their mortgage payments, and they cannot ask to be repaid for more than their actual expenses.