Reacting to a Politico report that group of Jan. 6 insurrectionists have filed a lawsuit in Florida against the Capitol police officers they assaulted in Donald Trump’s name, “Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough went on a furious rant on Tuesday morning that concluded with a long, drawn-out obscenity.

After co-host Mika Brzezinski noted the lawsuit seeks to “represent a class of plaintiffs that includes dozens of others present that day” who stormed the hall of Congress, the outraged Scarborough exploded.

Noting the plaintiffs appear to want to sue the “family of four dead cops,” he exclaimed, “Those rioters are the reason their family members are dead.”

“Are those the same rioters that injured over 140 police officers?” he asked rhetorically. “Are those the same rioters that jammed cops' heads in doors and kept beating them up and almost killed them on the spot? Is that those rioters that are bringing American flags, those rioters?”

“Yeah, those,” Brzezinski replied. “ We're going to dig into that new pretty-craven lawsuit,” as Scarborough let out a long disgusted “S---” as they went to commercial.

Toward the end of Monday’s briefing, a reporter reminded White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt that Pope Leo XIV, in remarks delivered on Palm Sunday, said God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.” Citing a Bible passage, the pontiff added, “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: Your hands are full of blood.”...

Take Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, for example. The Washington Post reported earlier this week:

Longtime norms are being upended by the proselytizing Christian campaign of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, say multiple former high-ranking military officials and experts on religion and law. Rather than boosting cohesion through a more universal spiritual uplift, they say, the new approach violates the Constitution and undermines the bonds of mutual respect between troops that are essential, especially in wartime.

The scope of the beleaguered Pentagon chief’s embrace of Christian nationalism is quite broad. In recent months, Hegseth has:

led Christian prayer services in the Pentagon’s auditorium;

invited radical Christian nationalist figures to speak at official prayer services;

used social media to promote messages that suggest his faith should dominate over other religious traditions; and

argued during an official press briefing that Americans should take a knee and pray “in the name of Jesus Christ,” at the same briefing in which he quoted Scripture.

At an event last week, Hegseth took matters to a new level when he prayed for U.S. troops to inflict “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. … We ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ.”......

The New Republic’s Greg Sargent had a related report this week:

If Hegseth truly believes his war on Iran is unfolding in accordance with his conception of biblical law — the highest authority of all — then that explains why he treats all those niggling secular constraints as unbinding on him. Maximum violence and killing of the enemy — who cry out to God but, unlike Hegseth, don’t get an answer back from Him — are affirmatively good.

‘It’s not the way somebody who claims to be a person of God — a religious person — should think,’ [Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona], who has flown many combat missions himself, told me. War, he added, ‘is a morally and ethically complicated thing for any person. Any serious warfighter struggles with it.’ If we don’t wrestle with this, Kelly said, we’ll ‘start to lose ourselves.’

Looking ahead, there are limited options to curtail the defense secretary’s public advocacy of Christian nationalism — Donald Trump could intervene, though that seems exceedingly unlikely — but Hegseth’s critics are not powerless. On the contrary, some of the Pentagon chief’s policies related to religious promotion have already sparked litigation, which opens the door to possible court-imposed limits. Watch this space.

Long before John Eastman helped devise Donald Trump’s bid to overturn the 2020 election, he had another pet cause: ending birthright citizenship.....

Yet, when Trump signed his order on the subject last year, he made no mention of the former law school dean and Supreme Court clerk’s long advocacy for the cause. And while the Justice Department’s public briefs closely track Eastman’s arguments, they don’t cite his writings or acknowledge his role as the theory’s leading evangelist.

“This is his issue,” said Linda Chavez, a longtime conservative activist and senior Reagan White House official who has sparred publicly with Eastman on the subject. “I’ve known John forever and this has been a bee in his bonnet for as long as I’ve known him.”....

Eastman has been advancing his fringe interpretation of the 14th Amendment since 2005, racking up more than 100 op-eds, interviews, law review articles, debates, speeches and legislative hearings.....

And Eastman is still battling the fallout from the 2020 election. He helped concoct the theory that Trump could cling to power by having Vice President Mike Pence refuse to count some states’ electoral votes. That didn’t persuade Pence, but did score Eastman a speaking role at Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021 rally on the Ellipse, where Eastman aired unproven claims of election fraud.

He subsequently lost his professorship at Chapman University and has been suspended from practicing law in California. He’s appealing a decision calling for his permanent disbarment in that state.

A US judge has blocked Donald Trump from proceeding with the construction of his $400m White House ballroom.

The US president demolished the East Wing of the White House last year to make way for the project.

US district judge Richard Leon in Washington granted a request for a preliminary injunction by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a non-profit organization that brought a lawsuit alleging Trump exceeded his authority when he razed the historic East Wing and launched construction without approval from Congress.

The decision by Leon, an appointee of Republican president George W Bush, keeps the 90,000-sq-ft ballroom project on hold while the lawsuit continues.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday sided with a Christian counselor over Colorado in her challenge to the state’s ban on so-called conversion therapy for minors.

In an 8-1 ruling by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the court said that the state’s law, as applied to talk therapy provided by the counselor, Kaley Chiles, conflicts with First Amendment principles because it regulates speech based on viewpoint. Gorsuch wrote that the amendment “stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country.”

About half the states in the country have banned or restricted the practice that aims to change a child’s sexual orientation or gender identity.....

Focusing in on Chiles’ claim, Gorsuch called the question before the court a narrow one. “Ms. Chiles does not question that Colorado’s law banning conversion therapy has some constitutionally sound applications,” the Trump appointee wrote. He noted that she doesn’t take issue with the state’s effort to prohibit physical interventions, but rather, she only provides talk therapy.

The problem, she argued, is that because the state’s law strikes at the heart of First Amendment speech protections, the lower courts didn’t provide rigorous enough scrutiny against the state in her legal challenge. ....

Upholding the district court’s ruling against Chiles, a divided appellate panel said the law only “incidentally” involves speech because counseling necessarily involves speech, but that the state isn’t restricting her constitutional expression.

“In other words, Ms. Chiles’s First Amendment right to freedom of speech is implicated under the MCTL [Minor Conversion Therapy Law], but it is not abridged,” the panel majority said, over dissent from a judge who said the majority’s “wordplay” in distinguishing speech from conduct posed “a serious threat to free speech.”

The panel majority noted that Chiles remained free to share her views on conversion therapy, sexual orientation and gender identity; that she can criticize Colorado for restricting her administration of conversion therapy; that she can refer clients to other service providers, like religious ministers; and that she can provide conversion therapy to adult clients.

But as some Jan. 6 rioters ended up in court to face criminal charges, others headed to court for a very different reason. Politico reported:

Members of the mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 are suing the federal government for tens of millions of dollars in damages, claiming that the ‘indiscriminate’ use of force by police officers repelling the attack caused them physical and emotional injuries.

The lawsuit, filed in Florida, takes aim at the conduct of Capitol Police and Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department, whose outnumbered officers fended off the mob for hours while members of Congress fled.

This might seem like a twisted joke, but the civil litigation is quite real: A group of Jan. 6 rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol as part of an insurrectionist assault on American democracy. They faced resistance from law enforcement officers who protected the U.S. seat of government. The rioters, unsatisfied with presidential pardons, now want a taxpayer-financed payoff for their troubles.....

It was almost a year ago, for example, that Trump’s Justice Department reached a settlement with the family of Ashli Babbitt, the Jan. 6 rioter who was fatally shot by a police officer during the attack on the U.S. Capitol. As part of the agreement, the Republican administration announced plans to pay roughly $5 million to settle a wrongful death lawsuit filed by Babbitt’s relatives......

Last week, it happened again. Former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn filed an equally outlandish civil suit, claiming wrongful prosecution in a case in which he had already pleaded guilty (twice) to the underlying charges. Trump’s Justice Department agreed to a settlement with him, too, reportedly worth $1.25 million.

With these developments in mind, why wouldn’t Jan. 6 rioters line up for a slice of the pie? The president has already expressed an interest in giving them taxpayer money anyway, and their baseless civil suit offers a convenient vehicle for Trump to use the national treasury to reward some his most radical followers.

I’d put the odds of a generous settlement at around 100%.

It was a couple of weeks ago when the White House first let Congress know that the administration is looking for an additional $200 billion on top of existing military spending to help cover the costs associated with the war with Iran. When Donald Trump was asked why he needed the money, the president told reporters early last week, “It’s always nice to have.”....

Broadly speaking, members have three options. They could simply decline to approve the additional spending, as most Democrats and even some Republicans are prepared to do. They also have the choice of passing legislation to spend the $200 billion, adding the costs to the nation’s budget deficit, which tends to be how modern military conflicts have been financed.

The third option, however, is the one that’s suddenly receiving the most attention: Lawmakers could approve the new spending, while cutting a comparable amount of existing spending to prevent a $200 billion increase in the deficit.

And where exactly would members find $200 billion? Axios reported:

Republicans are considering reductions in federal health spending to help pay for a budget bill containing as much as $200 billion to fund the Iran war and immigration enforcement.

New efforts to rein in health programs are sure to be controversial and open the GOP up to election-year attacks that they’re cutting health care to pay for an unpopular war.

....But that GOP officials are eyeing one unpopular idea (additional cuts to federal health care spending) to cover the costs of another unpopular idea (the ongoing war with Iran) is every bit as extraordinary as it appears. What’s more, that they’re considering these plans during an election year in which Republicans are already facing electoral headwinds looks an awful lot like political malpractice — and an unexpected gift to Democrats.....

A new Gallup poll found that 61% of Americans are worried “a great deal” about “the availability and affordability of health care.” That’s the most of any issue (51% are worried a great deal about the economy, and 50% about inflation) and it should send an unmistakable signal to policymakers about the public’s priorities.

With 31 weeks remaining before Election Day 2026, it’s a signal many Republicans appear ready to ignore.

KYIV (The Borowitz Report)—Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy offered on Tuesday to temp as US president while Donald J. Trump undergoes a full psychiatric evaluation.

“For the past few years, I’ve dealt with one catastrophe after another in Ukraine,” Zelenskyy told reporters. “This has uniquely prepared me for the current conditions on the ground in the United States.”

He called Trump’s wildly contradictory statements about the war in Iran “nothing more or less than a cry for help.”

Asked whether Trump was “playing with a full deck,” Zelenskyy said, “He has no cards.”

Last August, a gunman opened fire in Atlanta near the campuses of both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Emory University, killing a police officer and shooting many windows at the CDC headquarters. The suspect, who did not survive the assault, was reportedly fixated on the Covid-19 vaccine, blaming it for his health problems.....

For his part, RFK Jr. did condemn the shooting in Atlanta in a short message published to social media, but the Cabinet secretary waited until a day after the violence, and he posted his statement after posting images of himself fishing. (Donald Trump, meanwhile, failed to comment altogether on the shooting that left a police officer dead.)

As difficult as this might seem to believe, the CDC’s shot-up windows still haven’t been replaced. The Associated Press reported:

The federal government has not yet replaced the bullet-pocked windows that serve as a grim reminder of an attack at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention more than seven months ago, the agency’s acting chief acknowledged Wednesday.

CDC employees asked Dr. Jay Bhattacharya about the broken windows during a staff meeting, noting that the panes were papered over. ‘We’re working on that,’ Bhattacharya said, adding that it’s a priority.

.....To be sure, the problems are not altogether new. Last fall, nine former CDC chiefs, including Anne Schuchat, who served as an acting director during Trump’s first term, linked arms and wrote a joint op-ed, in which they characterized Kennedy’s work as a dangerous public menace. (The headline said, “We Ran the C.D.C.: Kennedy Is Endangering Every American’s Health.”)

It was around this same time when it became common to see reports quoting CDC insiders referring to the agency in the past tense. The New York Times published a report with a headline and subhead that immediately generated some attention: “Will the C.D.C. Survive? Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s assault may have dealt lasting damage to the agency, experts fear, with harsh consequences for public health.”

Seven months later, existential questions about the CDC’s future remain unanswered, and the fact that bullet-pocked windows remain in place at the agency’s headquarters make it difficult to be optimistic.

Donald Trump hasn’t been subtle about his contempt for Rep. Eric Swalwell. In recent years, the president has condemned the California Democrat as “a loser,” “a lowlife,” an “idiot” and a “total sleazebag.” If the Republican has an enemies list specifically focused on members of Congress, it’s probably fair to say that Swalwell is near the top....

Almost five months later, however, the campaign against Swalwell — now a leading Democratic gubernatorial candidate in California — appears to be taking an even more aggressive turn. The Washington Post reported:

FBI Director Kash Patel is pressing to release a decade-old investigative file involving Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-California) and a suspected Chinese intelligence operative, recently dispatching agents in the bureau’s San Francisco office to quickly redact the files before they are released publicly despite no evidence of wrongdoing by Swalwell, according to three people familiar with the effort.

The potential release is part of the Trump administration’s aggressive push to investigate Swalwell, a vocal critic of President Donald Trump and a leading Democratic candidate for California governor, according to the people familiar with the effort.

......If the latest reporting is correct, however, the Trump loyalist leading the FBI wants the decade-old investigative file released anyway. The Post’s report, highlighting the obvious, noted, “It is highly unusual for the FBI to release case files tied to a probe that did not result in criminal charges.”

Over the weekend, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement, “The FBI is attempting to smear a sitting U.S. Congressman, candidate for governor, and vocal opponent of the president. What the hell does that have to do with law enforcement? This is plain weaponization of the FBI for partisan political purposes. … The abuse of government information is out of control.”....

Time will tell what comes of this, but whether Team Trump appreciates this or not, there’s a very real possibility that the alleged smear campaign will backfire. Let’s not forget that Adam Schiff’s Democratic Senate campaign in California benefited enormously from Trump’s attacks: The then-representative was able to tell voters honestly that the Republican president and his allies hated him, which made Schiff even more popular in one of the nation’s most Democratic-leaning states.