Billionaire Scott Bessent has been a long-time supporter of the King’s charities, while Camilla stayed at his sprawling home in the Hamptons, New York, in
Well, that was fast.
Last Wednesday, President-Elect Donald Trump shocked even his allies by nominating Representative Matt Gaetz to be attorney general. Today, Gaetz has pulled out of consideration, one day after meeting with senators on Capitol Hill.
“It is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition,” the Florida man wrote on X . “There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I’ll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as Attorney General. Trump’s DOJ must be in place and ready on Day 1.”
For at least one presidential nominee to withdraw at some point in the process is very common. What is unusual is how quickly Gaetz’s nomination fell apart. Eight days is not the record, but it’s close. (Recall that White House Physician Ronny Jackson’s nomination to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs took nearly a month to collapse .) Just two days ago , Trump was insisting he had no second thoughts about picking Gaetz.
[Listen: What Pete Hegseth’s nomination is all about ]
The reason Gaetz withdrew is no secret and no surprise. He’s been shadowed for years by allegations of sex trafficking, paying for sex, drug use, and sex with an underage girl. Trump doesn’t appear to have bothered to vet Gaetz in any serious way before nominating him, but all of this was known. The Justice Department investigated Gaetz for years but in 2023 decided against bringing charges; the House Ethics Committee was still probing him. Gaetz himself denies any wrongdoing. The fact that Gaetz, like Trump, has a personal vendetta against the Justice Department seemed to be his main credential for the job .
When Gaetz was nominated, he also resigned from Congress. That froze the House Ethics Committee investigation, because he was no longer a member. Speaker Mike Johnson, a Gaetz ally albeit primly conservative where Gaetz is a libertine, opposed releasing the committee’s work, and the committee deadlocked in a vote. But Gaetz’s victory was hardly complete. His nomination dislodged lots of damaging new information, including testimony about him twice having sex with a 17-year-old, though witnesses believed that Gaetz did not know she was underage. A lawyer for two women said they testified to the House that Gaetz had paid them for sex. The New York Times published an impossibly elaborate diagram outlining payment schemes. Gaetz fooled around, and the public found out; by accepting the scrutiny that comes with a nomination, he also fooled around and found out .
But don’t cry too much for Gaetz, and not only because of his record as a scoundrel. (He’s detested by House colleagues, and many reports indicate that he shared naked videos of paramours on the House floor.) His infamy didn’t prevent his rise until now, and he is believed to have designs on running for governor of Florida when Ron DeSantis’s term ends.
The question is what this defeat portends for the rest of Trump’s slate of outrageous nominees . The president-elect likes to take a gamble, even if he sometimes loses, but as I argued last week , the presence of so many unqualified picks might perversely make it easier for some of them to get through—after all, the Senate can’t reject them all, right?
[Read: The perverse logic of Trump’s nomination circus ]
Gaetz’s speedy exit shows that Senate Republicans aren’t willing to accept literally anyone Trump throws their way, and the fact that they were able to send that message so quickly suggests just how deep their reservations were. If the rejection is a sign of weakness for Trump, it is also one for his vice president–elect, Senator J. D. Vance. Vance was given the tough job of squiring Gaetz around Senate offices yesterday to drum up support, which obviously did not go well.
The Gaetz failure doesn’t mean that senators will reject any other picks, but with Gaetz out of the way, the troubled nomination of Pete Hegseth to lead the Pentagon will be able to get more attention. A police report about a sexual-assault allegation against Hegseth from 2017 was released today, and it’s a stomach-churning read . Alternatively, Gaetz could end up looking like a sacrificial pick to save the others, or like a stalking horse for Trump to appoint someone else at DOJ. It seems unlikely that Trump intended either of these—he doesn’t usually play to lose—but that could be the effect.
Before Trump chose Gaetz, he reportedly concluded that other contenders simply didn’t have what he wanted in an attorney general, according to The New York Times . Now he’ll have to go back his lists to choose someone who has one thing that Gaetz conspicuously lacked: the ability to get confirmed.
The 12-year-old girl was waiting for a bus to take her to school. The suspect is ‘well known’ to Pasadena police.
Abida Sultaan defied stereotypes around women in general and Muslim women in particular.
Via Reuters: Trump picks former acting AG Matthew Whitaker as nominee for NATO ambassador.
President-elect Donald Trump chose lawyer Matthew Whitaker on Wednesday to be U.S. ambassador to NATO, selecting a loyalist with little foreign policy experience for what may be one of the highest-profile ambassadorships during Trump’s second administration.
[…]Whitaker, who served as acting attorney general for three months during Trump’s 2017-2021 term, has been actively involved with the America First Policy Institute, a right-leaning think tank that has been working to shape policy for Trump’s second term.
Whitaker was known as one of the most outspoken critics of a special counsel investigation into contacts between Trump’s successful 2016 presidential campaign and Russian officials.
The best I can say about him is that he is more qualified to be AG than Gaetz is, but that is what we call in the trade, “damning with faint praise.”
More on his background from NPR :
Whitaker, 55, has no experience in foreign or military affairs, but he did work in the Justice Department during Trump’s first term in office, initially as chief of staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and then briefly as acting attorney general after Sessions was pushed out in 2018.
He also served as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa during the George W. Bush administration. Whitaker has deep roots in Iowa; he grew up there and played football at the University of Iowa.
Everyone will be relieved to know that he did have a brief stint on CNN in 2017, so the TV box has been checked yet again. The loyalty box should be obvious.
Of course, the main thing I remember from his stint as interim AG, apart from his thin resume, is this (via Vanity Fair ):
Whitaker appeared in multiple promotional videos for the company’s products , offerings that included a toilet for “well-endowed men” and “theoretical time-travel commodity tied directly to price of bitcoin.”
I did not recall this part:
He also reportedly used his prior work as a federal prosecutor to intimidate people who complained the company was a scam. According to e-mails filed by the F.T.C, in August 2015 Whitaker allegedly responded to a customer who had complained about World Patent Marketing to the Better Business Bureau by telling them, “I am assuming you understand that there could be serious civil and criminal consequences for you. Understand that we take threats like this quite seriously.” Another victim who tried to get a refund received an e-mail from a company lawyer who told her, “Since you used e-mail to make your threats, you would be subject to a federal extortion charge, which carries a term of imprisonment of up to two years and potential criminal fines. See 18 U.S.C. ii 875(d).” In other incredible correspondences, customers were threatened with a “World Patent Marketing Security Team” comprised of “ex-Israeli Special Ops” who are “trained to knockout first and ask questions later.”
So, you know, only the best.
“ABC issued an official statement confirming that Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg’s contracts will not be renewed.”
“The U.S Senate accidentally passed a bill banning Trump from becoming President, and Biden is planning to sign it.”
Popular conservative radio host Erick Erickson blasted the Trump transition team for reportedly blocking a pro-life activist from a prominent role inside the Department of Health and Human Services on Saturday.
Politico reported this week that anti-abortion activist Roger Severino – a Project 2025 co-author – had been floated for a senior role inside Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s HHS but that the first Trump term alum was blocked by his team amid concerns he might alienate moderates.
Erickson shared the reporting and commented, “Trump is putting a pro-abortion activist in charge of HHS and his team is blocking a great pro-life champion from a position in HHS. This is not a good look.”
Politico reported:
Donald Trump’s transition team has rejected a push to install a prominent Project 2025 author in a senior role at the Department of Health and Human Services over concerns that his strident anti-abortion views would prove too controversial. Anti-abortion groups had been lobbying Trump’s HHS secretary nominee, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to select Roger Severino, a longtime anti-abortion stalwart, as the department’s deputy secretary.
The installation of Severino, director of HHS’ Office for Civil Rights during the first Trump administration, was aimed at allaying some of the groups’ concerns about Kennedy’s abortion record.
But senior Trump officials rejected Severino because of the anti-abortion policies he outlined in the health care section of Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s roadmap for a second Trump presidency that became a lightning rod on the campaign trail — according to six people familiar with the situation, granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. Some of them worried Severino’s nomination would further inflame fears among voters and moderate Republican lawmakers that Trump might widely restrict abortion access, distracting from the rest of the president-elect’s agenda, though they added that Trump officials remain open to appointing other anti-abortion officials at HHS.
Earlier this week, Erickson urged Senate Republicans to block Kennedy as HHS secretary, describing him as a “nut job.” While making an appeal to traditional conservatives, Erickson made an issue of Kennedy’s perosnal life – inlduing his marriages and extramarital affairs.
“And you wanna put a pro-abortion Kennedy progressive womanizer in charge of that position?!” he said. “Because he questions the Covid vaccine and thinks we shouldn’t have red dye number 5 in food?”
Erickson concluded Kennedy did not have a “worldview that any Bible-believing Christian should support.”
The post ‘Not a Good Look’: Erick Erickson Blasts Trump Transition Team Blocking Anti-Abortion HHS Deputy Pick As ‘Too Controversial’ first appeared on Mediaite .
For the second week in a row, the Supreme Court did not add any new cases to its docket for the 2024-25 term. In a list of orders released on Monday morning, the justices turned down several dozen petitions for review that they had considered at their private conference on Friday, including petitions asking them to weigh in on the constitutionality of state campaign finance laws and an Alabama man’s death sentence.
The justices once again did not act on several high-profile petitions for review, involving issues such as the constitutionality of the admissions program for three of Boston’s elite public high schools and a challenge to a Wisconsin school district’s plan to provide support to transgender and nonbinary students. The justices will meet again for another private conference on Friday, Nov. 22.
More than 14 years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission , which removed limits on independent political expenditures by corporations and unions, the justices declined to weigh in on a challenge to the constitutionality of two campaign-finance laws enacted by Alaska voters in 2020.
The laws were put in place to target the role of “dark money” – money spent to influence elections, but without the public knowing the source of the funds. One regulation requires anyone who gives more than $2,000 in a calendar year to groups that spend money to influence the elections of candidates to report the donation within 24 hours. A second regulation requires election ads to disclose when a majority of the donations that fund it come from outside Alaska.
Five voters and two groups that spend money on elections went to federal court in Alaska, arguing that the regulations violate the First Amendment. A federal district judge rejected their request to block the regulations before the 2022 elections, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit upheld that decision.
The challengers came to the Supreme Court this summer, asking the justices to take up their case. They contended that the regulations are an “outlier among all state and federal campaign finance rules” that place “unprecedented burdens on citizens’ right to speak about matters of public concern.” But after considering the appeal at five consecutive conferences, the justices ultimately denied review on Monday without comment.
The Supreme Court on Monday also refused to overturn the death sentence of Michael Iervolino , who was convicted of the 2019 shooting death of 20-year-old Sloan Harmon. Iervolino argued that his trial should have been moved to another venue, but Alabama’s highest court for criminal cases rejected that argument and upheld his sentence.
Prosecutors described Harmon’s murder as the result of a road rage incident. The case received widespread publicity because the victim was the son of the local district attorney. News articles discussed Iervolino’s history of criminal convictions and his recent release from jail; the coverage also contained comments from law enforcement officials describing the victim as a “great citizen” and a “great serviceman” and lamenting the impact of his loss on the community.
At Iervolino’s trial, both the district attorney and the judges in St. Clair County recused themselves from the proceeding. Iervolino argued that he could not receive a fair trial because of the victim’s relationship to the local district attorney and because of the news coverage that the case had received. But the trial judge twice denied Iervolino’s request to move the trial elsewhere, and he was convicted and sentenced to death.
The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the trial court’s denial of Iervolino’s motion to move the trial, as well as his conviction and death sentence. The Alabama Supreme Court declined to review his case.
Iervolino came to the Supreme Court this summer, asking the justices to take up his case and reverse. He contended that the “failure to provide a fair hearing by a panel of impartial, indifferent jurors violates the most basic requirement of due process.”
The state countered that Iervolino had not shown that he could not receive a fair trial in St. Clair County. Most of the news coverage of the murder was published nearly two years before the trial began, it observed. Only 18 of the 70 prospective jurors said that they had heard about the case, the state emphasized. Of those 18 prospective jurors, the state wrote, six were excused from the jury pool, while the other 12 said they had not prejudged the case based on their knowledge of it.
The justices requested the record in Iervolino’s case from the lower court – a sign that at least some justices were giving the case a close look – but ultimately denied review without comment.
The justices also declined to weigh in on a technical question arising from the challenge to a West Virginia law that bans transgender girls and women from competing in girls’ and women’s sports at the middle school, high school, and college levels. The justices did not act, however, on West Virginia’s petition for review of a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit that allowed a 13-year-old transgender girl to remain on her school’s track and cross-country teams.
This article was originally published at Howe on the Court .
The post Supreme Court won’t hear challenge to Alaska campaign finance laws appeared first on SCOTUSblog .
The Petitions of the Week column highlights some of the cert petitions recently filed in the Supreme Court. A list of all petitions we’re watching is available here.
Federal law limits the government’s ability to place a substantial burden on the free exercise of religion. Yet as long as Congress does not intentionally discriminate against a particular faith, the Supreme Court has permitted the legislative branch to manage internal government operations — for example, by allowing private development on public lands — even when it affects religious worship. This week, we highlight petitions that ask the court to consider, among other things, whether Congress can hand over part of a national forest in Arizona that is sacred to the San Carlos Apache Tribe to a private company seeking to mine the land for copper.
Located about 100 miles east of Phoenix, the San Carlos Apache Reservation is home to a number of bands of the Western Apache people. Between Phoenix and the reservation is the Tonto National Forest, the largest national forest in Arizona. As it does with many federal lands, the U.S. Forest Service has long sold or leased portions of the forest to mining, timber, and other companies.
Roughly halfway along the drive from Phoenix sits the Oak Flat campground, a 760-acre section of the forest that Congress cordoned off from private development in the 1950s. To the Western Apache, Oak Flat, called Chi’chil Biłdagoteel, is the corridor to the Creator and the site of sacred ceremonies that cannot be conducted elsewhere. The land has been used by various tribes and their ancestors for religious rituals for a thousand years.
In the 1990s, prospectors discovered the third-largest underground copper deposit in the world below the Tonto National Forest. Resolution Mining, a private mining company, negotiated for rights to mine that copper from the Forest Service.
Part of the deposit sits directly under Oak Flat. Starting in 2005, members of Arizona’s congressional delegation repeatedly introduced legislation to transfer Oak Flat and the surrounding land to Resolution Mining. Initial efforts to do so were unsuccessful, but in 2014, Congress attached a provision to a major spending bill — known as an appropriations rider — authorizing a land exchange between the Forest Service and the mining company. Included in the land Resolution Mining is set to receive is the Oak Flat campground.
The law authorizing the land exchange required (among other things) an environmental impact statement assessing the effects of the transfer. In 2021, the Forest Service published the impact statement, triggering a 60-day window for the transfer of the land.
Apache Stronghold, an advocacy group created by members of the San Carlos Apache Tribe, went to federal court in an effort to stop the transfer. Because a copper mine would collapse the land under Oak Flat and destroy it as a sacred site, the group argued that the land exchange would infringe upon the tribe’s First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion. Further, the group contended, the exchange would violate the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which requires courts to closely scrutinize federal actions that “substantially burden” religious free exercise.
A federal district court in Arizona rejected the group’s request to stop the land exchange, and the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit affirmed that ruling. The court of appeals held that the First Amendment challenge was foreclosed by a 1988 Supreme Court decision permitting Congress to sell off public lands that were sacred to an indigenous tribe for timber development. As in that case, the court of appeals explained, although the transfer here would “significantly interfere with” the tribe’s ability to practice their religion, the government’s actions did not violate the Constitution because they did not “coerce” members of the tribe “into acting contrary to their religious beliefs.”
And RFRA did not change the playing field, the 9th Circuit insisted, because Congress enacted the law against the backdrop of that decision — with an understanding that only restrictions on private places of worship can constitute a “substantial[] burden” on free exercise rights.
In Apache Stronghold v. United States , the group asks the justices to reverse the full 9th Circuit’s ruling. It insists that the plain meaning of a “substantial[] burden” on religious worship under RFRA includes an action that would, like destroying Oak Flat to mine for copper, effectively prohibit that worship altogether. In addition, RFRA overrides the Supreme Court’s prior decision on public lands, the group says, because that decision only applied to generally applicable laws that incidentally burden religion — a distinction Congress intentionally did away with when enacting the 1993 law.
The government and Resolution Mining urge the justices to leave the 9th Circuit’s ruling in place. In the government’s view, the text of RFRA and debates surrounding its enactment are clear evidence that Congress believed the law to respect, rather than displace, the primacy of federal land-use rights over tribal religious rights affirmed in the court’s 1988 ruling. But in any event, Resolution Mining argues, the 2014 appropriations bill impliedly exempted the Oak Flat exchange from RFRA, as future Congresses are not bound by the actions of those past. And the group’s First Amendment claim rises or falls with the RFRA analysis, the government adds.
Utah v. United States
22O160
Issue: Whether the federal policy embodied in 43 U.S.C. § 1701(a)(1)
of perpetual federal retention of unappropriated public lands in Utah is unconstitutional.
Fuld v. Palestine Liberation Organization
24-20
Issue: Whether the Promoting Security and Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act
violates the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment.
Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America v. McClain
24-118
Issue: Whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit erred in holding that a state may strip manufacturers of the ability preserved to them by the federal 340B Drug Pricing Program
to impose conditions on the use of contract pharmacies as part of the offer to provide 340B-priced drugs and intrude on 340B’s centralized enforcement scheme.
United States v. Palestine Liberation Organization
24-151
Issue: Whether the Promoting Security and Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act’s
means of establishing personal jurisdiction complies with the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment.
Apache Stronghold v. United States
24-291
Issue: Whether the government “substantially burdens” religious exercise under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act
, or must satisfy heightened scrutiny under the free exercise clause of the First Amendment, when it singles out a sacred site for complete physical destruction, ending specific religious rituals forever.
The post Western Apache group calls on court to block approval of copper mine on sacred site appeared first on SCOTUSblog .