Supreme Court restores Trump to ballot, rejecting state attempts to ban him

The Supreme Court on Monday restored Donald Trump to 2024 presidential primary ballots, rejecting state attempts to hold the Republican former president accountable for the Capitol riot. The justices ruled a day before the Super Tuesday primaries that states, without action from Congress first, cannot invoke a post-Civil War constitutional provision to keep presidential candidates from appearing on ballots. The outcome ends efforts in Colorado, Illinois, Maine and elsewhere to kick Trump, the front-runner for his party’s nomination, off the ballot because of his attempts to undo his loss in the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden, culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Trump’s case was the first at the Supreme Court dealing with a provision of the 14th Amendment that was adopted after the Civil War to prevent former officeholders who “engaged in insurrection” from holding office again. Colorado’s Supreme Court, in a first-of-its-kind ruling, had decided that the provision, Section 3, could be applied to Trump, who that court found incited the Capitol attack. No court before had applied Section 3 to a presidential candidate. Some election observers have warned that a ruling requiring congressional action to implement Section 3 could leave the door open to a renewed fight over trying to use the provision to disqualify Trump in the event he wins the election. In one scenario, a Democratic-controlled Congress could try to reject certifying Trump’s election on Jan. 6, 2025, under the clause. The issue then could return to the court, possibly in the midst of a full-blown constitutional crisis.

Congress reveals long-awaited bills ahead of next week’s shutdown threat

Congressional leaders on Sunday unveiled the long-awaited bipartisan bills to fund parts of the government for the rest of fiscal year 2024, setting off a sprint to avert the looming shutdown threat in less than a week. The six spending bills fund a slew of agencies until early fall, including the departments of Agriculture, Interior, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, Veterans Affairs, Energy, Justice, Commerce and Energy. 

The Hill reports the 1,050-page package includes more than $450 billion in funding for fiscal year 2024. Lawmakers have until Friday to pass the legislation or risk a partial government shutdown under a stopgap plan President Biden signed into law this week to buy more time for spending talks.  The Sunday rollout comes as Congress is behind in finishing up its funding work for fiscal 2024, which began five months ago. said Sunday that both sides were able to reach a funding compromise that will keep “the government open without cuts or poison pill riders.” 

However, Republicans are already claiming wins, touting cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the funding package.  The GOP-led House and Democrat-led Senate entered negotiations with vastly different bills this year, as House Republicans pursued much more partisan measures with steep cuts to government funding that went beyond budget caps agreed to as part of the debt limit deal brokered last year.

Trump-Biden rematch hits overdrive with Super Tuesday, State of the Union

Trump will have all but secured his party’s nomination after Super Tuesday, and Biden will use Thursday’s State of the Union address as a springboard to offer up a vision for a second term to millions of Americans before traveling in the days after the speech to battleground states Pennsylvania and Georgia.

Both men and their campaigns see it as being in their respective best interests for the general election cycle to kick into gear as quickly as possible, albeit for different reasons.

Trump and his team are ready to fully move on from nagging questions about Nikki Haley winning thousands of votes in the GOP primary, and the Trump campaign is eager to fully merge with the Republican National Committee (RNC) so it can bolster its lagging fundraising.

The Biden campaign, meanwhile, has insisted it will benefit once Trump is definitively the GOP nominee, a reality officials have argued millions of Americans have yet to realize.

“The next week is a big week,” said Jim Kessler, vice president of policy at the left-leaning think tank Third Way. “The Republican primary should be over at that point, and the president has the State of the Union. To me, the State of the Union is where Biden kicks off the general election.”

Sixteen states will head to the polls Tuesday to vote in presidential primaries. While Trump and Biden are on a collision course for a rematch in November, Tuesday’s results will allocate enough delegates to solidify that reality.

Haley, a former ambassador to the United Nations, is still in the race, but she has been unable to point to a single state where she can beat Trump.

Biden says Trump sowing doubts about US commitment to NATO is ‘un-American’

President Joe Biden on Tuesday said Donald Trump’s comments calling into question the U.S. commitment to defend its NATO allies from attack were “dangerous” and “un-American,” seizing on the former president’s comments that sowed fresh fears among U.S. partners about its dependability on the global stage.

Trump, the front-runner in the U.S. for the Republican Party’s nomination this year, said Saturday that he once warned that he would allow Russia to do whatever it wants to NATO member nations that are “delinquent” in devoting 2% of their gross domestic product to defense. It was the latest instance in which the former president seemed to side with an authoritarian state over America’s democratic allies .

Speaking from the White House as he encouraged the House to take up a Senate-passed aid bill to fund Ukraine’s efforts to hold off a two-year Russian invasion, Biden said Trump’s comments about the mutual defense pact were “dangerous and shocking.”

“The whole world heard it and the worst thing is he means it,” Biden added.

Biden said that “when America gives its word, it means something,” and called Trump’s comments sowing doubt about its commitments ”un-American.”

Biden said of Trump: “He doesn’t understand that the sacred commitment that we’ve given works for us as well.”

NATO’s Article 5 mutual defense clause states that an armed attack against one or more of its members shall be considered an attack against all members. But Trump has often depicted NATO allies as leeches on the U.S. military and openly questioned the value of the military alliance that has defined American foreign policy for more than 70 years.

Since the full scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Biden has ushered Finland into the alliance and is clearing the way for Sweden to do the same. While Ukraine is not a member of NATO, the alliance has served as a key contributor of the U.S.-organized effort to support Kyiv’s military defenses in the nearly two year old conflict.

House Republicans unveil articles of impeachment against DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas

House Republicans took a significant step forward Sunday in their effort to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas by formalizing their allegations ahead of a committee vote. Republicans allege in the first impeachment article that Mayorkas displayed a “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law,” while the second article argues that he breached public trust by having “knowingly made false statements, and knowingly obstructed lawful oversight of the Department of Homeland Security.” “These articles lay out a clear, compelling, and irrefutable case for Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ impeachment,” said House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green, R-Tenn., in a statement.