You’ve all heard the information by now. Right here’s the Axios model:
Trump ordered to pay $83.3 million to E. Jean Carroll in defamation trial
Context: The present trial is over Carroll’s unique 2019 defamation lawsuit in opposition to Trump, who’s the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination within the 2024 election.
Whereas within the White Home, Trump mocked Carroll and claimed that she fabricated her rape accusations in opposition to him to spice up her guide gross sales.
She filed a second lawsuit in 2022 in opposition to Trump, which ended final 12 months with a jury discovering him liable and ordering him to pay Carroll $5 million in damages.
Trump says the authorized system is uncontrolled. He additionally says Biden controls the authorized system.
Nothing he says is sensible, and little of what he says is true. However the E Jean Carroll award is information merchandise primary, and there is nothing Trump can do in regards to the unflattering protection.
Bolts journal:
Your Information to 4 Rising Threats to the Voting Rights Act
Conservatives are focusing on Part 2 of the landmark civil rights legislation with a collection of recent authorized arguments that danger unraveling it additional this 12 months.
Judges will resolve if essential protections afforded by Part 2 of the VRA stay relevant to the current, whether or not the legislation applies to statewide races and coalition districts, and even whether or not voting rights teams can ever convey a lawsuit underneath Part 2—a sleeper case that already detonated in an appeals courtroom final fall. Probably the most acute stakes concern the foundations of redistricting, with officers in GOP-run states together with Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, North Dakota, and Texas proposing new interpretations that may gasoline gerrymandering and undercut the voting energy of communities of coloration.
Right here is your roadmap to 4 main authorized threats that will additional unravel the VRA in 2024, and what instances try to be watching.
After which there’s this:
Washington Month-to-month:
Democrats can now flip the tables on the politics of the border
Final week, Senate Minority Chief Mitch McConnell publicly stated a deal linking Ukraine support and border safety reforms would get a Senate flooring vote this week.
This week, McConnell privately informed his Republican colleagues that “the politics on this have modified” due to Donald Trump’s opposition to any compromise, casting doubt whether or not the deal can transfer ahead.
Now the politics have actually modified … in methods that may profit President Joe Biden.
Cameron Joseph/Columbia Journalism Evaluate:
The Demise of the Washington Bureau
When Jonathan Salant began protecting Washington, within the Nineteen Eighties, he was considered one of greater than a half-dozen simply from upstate New York on the congressional beat. By the point NJ Advance Media, which owns the Newark Star-Ledger, laid him off final 12 months, they have been all gone—and he was the one reporter left protecting all the state of New Jersey (two have since joined from smaller publications). 13 of the fourteen members of New Jersey’s bipartisan congressional delegation wrote a observe to protest.
“[New Jersey Democratic senator] Bob Menendez is underneath indictment. And day-after-day he stops to speak to the press,” Salant stated. “And the issue is that the most important newspaper in New Jersey isn’t there to get to speak to him anymore.”
Salant is now on the Pittsburgh Put up-Gazette—and stated he’s on the solely Pennsylvania publication with a full-time DC bureau, now that the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Washington correspondent left for a nationwide enterprise publication final 12 months.
The Tampa Bay Instances, Omaha World-Herald, St. Louis Put up-Dispatch, Columbus Dispatch, Denver Put up, and Salt Lake Tribune all had Washington correspondents till not too long ago, simply to call a number of. They’re all gone, casualties of layoffs or off to nationwide or insider publications with extra purposeful enterprise fashions. Their desks within the Senate have been handed over to commerce publications or nationwide retailers or left as locations for reporters with out everlasting desks to squat for a day whereas they cowl Congress.
It’s bleak in all places.
Steve Benen/MSNBC:
Reagan-appointed decide slams GOP’s ‘preposterous’ Jan. 6 rhetoric
Among the most necessary commentary on Jan. 6 and Republican efforts to rewrite historical past has come, oddly sufficient, from the federal judiciary.
Whereas he didn’t point out any Republicans by identify, the decide particularly referenced radical rhetoric from a wide range of GOP members of Congress, together with Reps. Andrew Clyde of Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, and Elise Stefanik of New York, who not too long ago referred to Jan. 6 criminals as “hostages.”
The defendant on this particular case was a person named James Little, who has repeatedly claimed to be a sufferer of political persecution.
Greg Sargent/The New Republic:
Trump Forces Terrified Republicans to Bend the Knee But Once more
Mitch McConnell’s capitulation to the previous president exposes the actual MAGA.
Senate Minority Chief Mitch McConnell is on the verge of pulling the plug on any hopes for a bipartisan deal that features funding for border safety and support to Ukraine. The perpetrator? Donald Trump, who has been urging Republicans to reject any deal, on the obvious concept that any compromise with Democrats might be insufficiently anti-immigrant by definition.
This has been broadly seen as proof that Trump desires border chaos to proceed to make use of in opposition to President Biden within the election. However this complete episode reveals one thing else too: What Trump and the MAGA proper actually worry above all is a system that may perform higher with out resorting to the maximally merciless and excessive restrictions they see as the one acceptable “answer.”
