You’ve all heard the news by now. Here’s the Axios version:
Trump ordered to pay $83.3 million to E. Jean Carroll in defamation trial
Context: The current trial is over Carroll's original 2019 defamation lawsuit against Trump, who is the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination in the 2024 election.
- While in the White House, Trump mocked Carroll and claimed that she fabricated her rape accusations against him to boost her book sales.
- She filed a second lawsuit in 2022 against Trump, which ended last year with a jury finding him liable and ordering him to pay Carroll $5 million in damages.
Donald Trump says the legal system is out of control. He also says Joe Biden controls the legal system.
Nothing he says makes sense, and little of what he says is true. But the E. Jean Carroll award is news item number one, and there's nothing Trump can do about the unflattering coverage.
Truth:
Bolts magazine:
Your Guide to Four Emerging Threats to the Voting Rights Act
Conservatives are targeting Section 2 of the landmark civil rights law with a series of new legal arguments that risk unraveling it further this year.
Judges will decide if critical protections afforded by Section 2 of the VRA remain applicable to the present, whether the law applies to statewide races and coalition districts, and even whether voting rights groups can ever bring a lawsuit under Section 2—a sleeper case that already detonated in an appeals court last fall. The most acute stakes concern the rules of redistricting, with officials in GOP-run states including Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, North Dakota, and Texas proposing new interpretations that would fuel gerrymandering and undercut the voting power of communities of color.
Here is your roadmap to four major legal threats that may further unravel the VRA in 2024, and what cases you should be watching.
And then there’s this:
Washington Monthly:
Democrats can now turn the tables on the politics of the border
Last week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell publicly said a deal linking Ukraine aid and border security reforms would get a Senate floor vote this week.
This week, McConnell privately told his Republican colleagues that "the politics on this have changed" because of Donald Trump's opposition to any compromise, casting doubt whether the deal can move forward.
Now the politics have really changed ... in ways that can benefit President Joe Biden.
Cameron Joseph/Columbia Journalism Review:
The Death of the Washington Bureau
When Jonathan Salant started covering Washington, in the 1980s, he was one of more than a half-dozen just from upstate New York on the congressional beat. By the time NJ Advance Media, which owns the Newark Star-Ledger, laid him off last year, they were all gone—and he was the only reporter left covering the entire state of New Jersey (two have since joined from smaller publications). Thirteen of the fourteen members of New Jersey’s bipartisan congressional delegation wrote a note to protest.
“[New Jersey Democratic senator] Bob Menendez is under indictment. And every day he stops to talk to the press,” Salant said. “And the problem is that the largest newspaper in New Jersey isn’t there to get to talk to him anymore.”
Salant is now at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette—and said he’s at the only Pennsylvania publication with a full-time DC bureau, now that the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Washington correspondent left for a national business publication last year.
The Tampa Bay Times, Omaha World-Herald, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Columbus Dispatch, Denver Post, and Salt Lake Tribune all had Washington correspondents until recently, just to name a few. They’re all gone, casualties of layoffs or off to national or insider publications with more functional business models. Their desks in the Senate have been handed over to trade publications or national outlets or left as places for reporters without permanent desks to squat for a day while they cover Congress.
It’s bleak everywhere.
Steve Benen/MSNBC:
Reagan-appointed judge slams GOP’s ‘preposterous’ Jan. 6 rhetoric
Some of the most important commentary on Jan. 6 and Republican efforts to rewrite history has come, oddly enough, from the federal judiciary.
While he did not mention any Republicans by name, the judge specifically referenced radical rhetoric from a variety of GOP members of Congress, including Reps. Andrew Clyde of Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, and Elise Stefanik of New York, who recently referred to Jan. 6 criminals as “hostages.”
The defendant in this specific case was a man named James Little, who has repeatedly claimed to be a victim of political persecution.
Greg Sargent/The New Republic:
Trump Forces Terrified Republicans to Bend the Knee Yet Again
Mitch McConnell’s capitulation to the former president exposes the real MAGA.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is on the verge of pulling the plug on any hopes for a bipartisan deal that includes funding for border security and aid to Ukraine. The culprit? Donald Trump, who has been urging Republicans to reject any deal, on the apparent theory that any compromise with Democrats will be insufficiently anti-immigrant by definition.
This has been widely seen as evidence that Trump wants border chaos to continue to use against President Biden in the election. But this whole episode reveals something else too: What Trump and the MAGA right really fear above all is a system that might function better without resorting to the maximally cruel and extreme restrictions they see as the only acceptable “solution.”