Texas AG to Dems: Accept GOP Gerrymandering or I’ll Lock You Up

Texas Democrats are facing a potential lockdown as they oppose Donald Trump’s legislative redistricting effort.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton suggested Thursday that the state legislature could “lock the doors” on liberal-minded party members, trapping them into participating in a forced restructuring of Texas’s congressional maps.

“The House rules and the Senate rules both allow for these people to be arrested if they leave and ... they try to break the quorum,” Paxton told Steve Bannon on his War Room podcast Thursday. “The challenge is if they go out of state, we lose jurisdiction.”

Texas Republicans have dutifully responded to Trump’s demands that the party create five new right-wing seats ahead of the midterm elections. State conservatives unveiled their new House maps Wednesday, proposing to practically eviscerate historically Democratic districts.

State Democrats have planned to abscond from the state in order to avoid the vote. The party began fundraising earlier this week to offset the $500-a-day fines they’ll incur as a result. (Texas House rules prevent lawmakers from using their campaign funds to cover the fines, which were imposed in 2023 after an unsuccessful attempt to stop a Republican-led overhaul of the state’s election laws.)

“Well, when we say that, can’t you get to Texas Rangers?” Bannon asked Paxton. “How are we letting these guys, if they’re leaving the state specifically for the purpose of not coming in for their elected duties, can’t you stop them from leaving the state?”

“If I were the speaker of the House, if I were leading the Senate, I’d put rules in place, depending on which group they think is going to leave,” Paxton said, adding that he believed the House was the more likely group to skip town. “I’d put rules in place that basically lock us in until we get a vote because the House map is up on Friday.”

But Paxton’s vision was more akin to morphing the Pink Dome into a prison than initiating a genuine democratic exchange.

“You could lock them in for the rest of the session—two weeks—and just serve them food there, and they sleep there, and that’s just the way it is because we got to get these maps passed,” Paxton added.

A lawyer who had a starring role in Donald Trump’s first administration—and his attempts to overthrow the 2020 election—is learning that actions have consequences.

The D.C. Bar’s disciplinary arm has recommended that Jeffrey Clark, a longtime Trump ally who currently works in the Office of Management and Budget, be disbarred for his efforts to help the president try to subvert the 2020 election.

“While dishonesty is always intolerable, the facts here are significantly aggravating to warrant disbarment: [Clark] was prepared to cause the Justice Department to tell a lie about the status of its investigation of an important national issue (the integrity of the 2020 Presidential election),” the Bar’s board wrote in its recommendation. “Lawyers cannot advocate for any outcome based on false statements and they certainly cannot urge others to do so. [Clark] persistently and energetically sought to do just that on an important national issue.”

Clark, the former acting assistant attorney general in the environmental division of Trump’s Department of Justice, was a key player in the president’s attempted coup. Trump unsuccessfully tried to install him as acting attorney general in early 2021, and Clark then tried and failed to pressure Georgia lawmakers into overturning the election results (for which he was briefly indicted, before being deleted as a co-conspirator).

To the D.C. Bar, this behavior is severe enough that Clark should lose his legal license. “He should be disbarred as a consequence and to send a message to the rest of the Bar and to the public that this behavior will not be tolerated,” it wrote.

This recommendation will trigger Clark’s automatic suspension, and will head to the D.C. Court of Appeals for a final determination.

During a Thursday Fox Business appearance, Alabama Senator and gubernatorial candidate Tommy Tuberville announced that he’s introducing a bill to ban international students from Iran, China, and North Korea.

Tuberville recalled attending a recent graduation ceremony whose program, he said, included “40 Chinese nationals [getting] their degree in engineering and cyber,” leading him to the conclusion: “We are funding our own demise.”

“We have to do everything we possibly can to penalize universities that drop the ball on this agenda because if we don’t do that, we are not going to educate our kids,” Tuberville said.

The senator also claimed that international students are displacing American students, who “apply, but they can’t get in because there’s no slots for them, because of all the foreign nationals coming in.” To that end, he said his bill includes provisions to limit the total number of international students, while the focus is to keep students from rival countries out.

“We want to make sure we limit the number that comes in,” he said. “But we surely want to limit our adversaries. We want to do away with Iran, North Koreans, or Chinese nationals getting into this country and learning how to destroy the United States of America and our allies.”

Tuberville’s proposal to exclude students on the basis of national origin is so paranoid and nativist as to be absurd. A flood of North Korean students isn’t exactly a serious concern for the United States, which has, reportedly, not since the 2015–2016 school year welcomed a number of students from the People’s Republic that exceeds the single digits.

It’s also simply untrue that foreign students impede the education of American students, as evidence indicates that they are a great boon to the U.S. higher education system.

As the Brookings Institution notes, international students constitute a small minority of U.S. enrollment while contributing disproportionately to college and university budgets, namely in paying higher tuition. They also greatly support their surrounding communities. Removing international students, then, would hurt the economy, “add much to the trade deficit, harm many college budgets, and badly damage businesses in many college towns.”

Further, by subsidizing the cost of domestic students, “international students actually raise domestic enrollment,” according to a 2017 study by economist Kevin Shih, who analyzed periods where foreign enrollment underwent significant booms and busts. Shih estimates that when enrollment increases by 10 additional international students, domestic enrollment increases by about eight—a pattern that holds true as well for enrollment decreases.

One day before Donald Trump’s worldwide tariffs are slated to go into effect, an appeals court is scrutinizing his use of an “emergency” law to justify the sweeping duties.

On Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit heard oral arguments on the legality of the tariffs—a high-stakes lawsuit, brought by 12 Democrat-led states and five small businesses, which could derail the president’s tariff scheme.

Since February, Trump has justified his tariffs by citing the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, a law from 1977 that allows the president to issue economic sanctions in an emergency situation: specifically, to counter an “unusual and extraordinary threat.” Trump’s use of the law allows him to sidestep Congress, which is granted the power to impose tariffs by the Constitution.

He’s the first-ever president to impose tariffs by invoking the emergency law—something many of the appeals judges pointed out.

“It’s just hard for me to see that Congress intended to give the president in IEEPA the wholesale authority to throw out the tariff schedule that Congress has adopted after years of careful work and revise every one of these tariff rates,” said Judge Timothy Dyk. “It’s really kind of asking for an extraordinary change to the whole approach,” he continued.

The act has forced Trump to create so-called emergencies that his tariffs must mitigate. In March, Trump said that the fentanyl emergency was the reason behind his tariffs on Canada, China, and Mexico. In April, he upped the ante and levied a 10 percent global baseline tariff, naming the emergency in question as the trade deficit.

But one judge, Raymond Chen, pushed back on that reasoning: “Can the trade deficit be an extraordinary and unusual threat when we have had trade deficits for decades?”

Overall, CNN reports that 10 out of 11 judges on Thursday were skeptical of the president’s use of the act, questioning why Trump is leaning on a law that makes no reference to tariffs and has never before been used to levy them.

Judge Jimmie Reyna asked, “But IEPPA has been rarely used, hasn’t it? It’s been over 50 years since it’s been used?”

He continued, “IEEPA doesn’t even say tariffs, doesn’t even mention them.”

The U.S. Court of International Trade sided against the president in May, and the administration quickly appealed. The appeals court has allowed Trump’s tariffs to remain in place while the case is being challenged. Depending on the court’s ruling—which, as of now, is not looking too good for Trump—the tariffs’ future could be left in the increasingly partisan hands of the Supreme Court.

Alan Dershowitz has fought many battles over the course of his legal career. He has fought on behalf of O.J. Simpson, Jeffrey Epstein, and Donald Trump. Now he will fight for himself—against a pierogi seller at a Martha’s Vineyard farmers market who was mean to him.

During Wednesday’s episode of the Dershow podcast (that’s what it’s actually called), the constitutional attorney announced his intent to sue a pierogi vendor at the West Tisbury Farmers Market in Massachusetts after the man refused to fork over the dumplings.

“I don’t approve of your politics, I don’t approve of who you’ve represented, I don’t approve of who you support,” Dershowitz recalled the man saying.

Dershowitz recounted that he’d earned strange looks from the same man when he’d visited the stall the week before wearing a T-shirt identifying him as a “Proud Zionist.”

“The clear implication was that he opposed me because I defended Donald Trump and because I was a Zionist,” Dershowitz claimed.

In a video of the incident posted to social media, a police officer informed a distraught Dersh that private establishments have the right to refuse service. While private establishments are barred from discrimination on the basis of sex, race, or religion, political affiliation is not a protected attribute, and neither is defending an alleged sex trafficker with ties to the president.

Three different vendors had made complaints about Dershowitz, the officer said.

On his podcast, Dershowitz said that he would sue the farmers market to adopt a policy to sell to everyone.

He also explained that the insidious bigotry he’d experienced had spread even beyond the farmers market stall: His books had been banned from the libraries, and he’d been  blacklisted from speaking at the synagogue.

“It’s worse than McCarthyism of the 1950s, because McCarthyism of the 1950s went after the people themselves—the communists, the lawyers who represented the communists,” he said. “In Chilmark, they go after my wife, they go after my children, they go after my grandchildren, and they take it out on everybody.”

This isn’t the first time that Dershowitz has claimed McCarthyism has come for Martha’s Vineyard. In 2018, he penned an op-ed for The Hill claiming that he had been shunned from the island’s social scene.