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Texas Senate passes bill that would require public schools to use Christian B.C./A.D. system to track years

Texas Senate passes bill that would require public schools to use Christian B.C./A.D. system to track years

Yahoo20-05-2025
A bill greenlit by the Texas Senate on Monday would block school districts from purchasing instructional materials that do not use the terms 'Before Christ' (B.C.) and 'Anno Domini' (A.D.) when referring to historical time periods, marking the latest effort by lawmakers to emphasize Christianity in public schools.
Senate Bill 2617 passed the chamber on a 22-9 vote, sending the proposal to the Texas House for further consideration just two weeks before the legislative session is set to end.
In addition to preventing schools from purchasing certain materials, the bill would require districts to adopt policies mandating that teachers use B.C. and A.D. during classroom instruction, running contrary to the terms some academics prefer to use — 'Before Common Era' (B.C.E.) and 'Common Era' (C.E.).
'By putting this into law, the Senate bill protects Texas' long standing approach to teaching history clearly, consistently, without political distortion — giving parents, teachers and students confidence in a consistent foundation for learning,' said Sen. Brandon Creighton, the Republican bill author who chairs the education committee.
The legislation passed without a debate on the Senate floor.
'Before Christ' and 'Anno Domini' (which means 'In the year of our Lord') are commonly used to keep track of years before and after Jesus Christ's birth, a precise date that is unknown. Historians also use 'Before Common Era' and 'Common Era' in an effort to ensure time-tracking is inclusive of different faiths and cultures other than Christianity.
'It pains me that we would not be teaching our students to understand the terminology that is widely used throughout the world,' said Paul Colbert, a former state legislator who was the only person to testify on the bill during a committee hearing last month. 'But it pains me even more that we would be denying them the opportunity to learn about the respect for others' religious backgrounds, others' cultural backgrounds, that were the reason for that shift over time.'
The legislation is being proposed three years after the Texas State Board of Education considered moving away from using B.C. and A.D. in favor of the more religiously inclusive terms. The board ultimately did not adopt the policy — which members considered among broader revisions to the state's social studies standards — deciding instead to push back further discussion on history instruction to this year.
The State Board of Education has shifted further to the political right since then. It seems unlikely that the 10 Republicans who currently make up the panel's majority would support the policy previously put forward.
SB 2617's approval in the Senate comes as conservative Christians continue pushing to infuse more religion into public schools and life. Earlier this month, Texas became the latest state to allow families to use taxpayer dollars to fund their children's tuition at private and religious schools. The Senate has also advanced bills that would require public schools to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms and allow time for prayer.
Meanwhile, the State Board of Education authorized an optional elementary school curriculum last year that includes heavy references to the Bible and Christianity while omitting context highlighting the role slavery and racism played in major historical events.
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Project 2025 Data Leak Shows a Paul Ingrassia Calling for Test for Voting and Halting Immigration
Project 2025 Data Leak Shows a Paul Ingrassia Calling for Test for Voting and Halting Immigration

The Intercept

timean hour ago

  • The Intercept

Project 2025 Data Leak Shows a Paul Ingrassia Calling for Test for Voting and Halting Immigration

In 2024, as Donald Trump's reelection campaign gathered steam, the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 had its eye on staffing a new Republican administration. The initiative, which was designed around crafting an agenda for an incoming Trump White House, put out a call for aspiring administration officials. The application, including multiple-choice questions and open-ended queries, sought to place would-be Trump apparatchiks on the political spectrum and suss out their political priorities. One of the people who filled the form out entered a name that would echo through the first six months of Trump's new term: Paul Ingrassia. Ingrassia is set to land a powerful job as head of the Justice Department's Office of Special Counsel. Now, pending a Senate hearing this week, Ingrassia is set to land a powerful job as head of the Justice Department's Office of Special Counsel. Among other responsibilities related to the federal workforce, the office is supposed to protect whistleblowers and keep partisan politics out of the civil service. For Ingrassia's critics, he would be just the wrong person to lead OSC. The Project 2025 questionnaire answers given under Ingrassia's name would appear to bolster the case that the applicant's primary concern is loyalty to Trump and sharp-elbowed partisan politics. The responses include allusions to severely cutting down federal agencies because of their 'toxic ideologies'; halting immigration; and imposing a new test for voting. (Ingrassia did not respond to a request for comment.) A leaked dataset of the Project 2025 application questionnaires was released in June by the group Distributed Denial of Secrets, or DDoSecrets. An analysis of the leaked data showed that more than 13,000 people had filled out the applications. (Heritage did not respond to a request for comment.) DDoSecrets redacted the full entries for applicants but provided The Intercept with an unredacted version. The contact information and other personal data included in the Project 2025 file matched Paul Ingrassia's information. On July 24, Ingrassia will face a confirmation hearing in the Senate — and good government groups are opposing his bid. 'As head of OSC, the special counsel should be someone who respects federal workers, who will treat them fairly and without bias,' a group of 24 civil society groups led by the Project on Government Oversight wrote in an open letter to Senators opposing Ingrassia's nomination. 'The special counsel must be a person who will exercise their duties in a nonpartisan manner, a person of honesty and integrity who has the necessary experience to fulfill such an important role.' 'Paul Ingrassia is none of these.' Ingrassia has advocated for the arrest of the president's political enemies, said that Democrats are a threat to democracy, and labeled Republicans who disagree with him as RINOs — a derisive acronym meaning 'Republicans in Name Only.' In the Project 2025 questionnaire filled out under the name Paul Ingrassia, the respondent agreed that 'the President should be able to advance his/her agenda through the bureaucracy without hinderance from unelected federal officials.' A response to a prompt about which political issue he was most passionate about and why included a long list of pet projects. 'I'm passionate about restructuring the administrative state, condensing the size and scope of the various bureaucratic agencies, defunding many of them, given how destructive they and their toxic ideologies have been on the American way of life; reform and shut down many of the intelligence agencies; fully upend the justice department; reform the courts; redesign Washington, D.C., and build an even better city in its wake,' the Project 2025 applicant wrote. The questionnaire also asked respondents to 'name one living public policy figure whom you greatly admire and why.' The response — Trump and Pat Buchanan — lacked an explanation. When asked to 'name one person, past or present, who has most influenced the development of your political philosophy,' the data under Paul Ingrassia's name said 'Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Donald Trump.' The answer to the question about what issues the applicant was passionate about said: I'm also very passionate about immigration — specifically, ending birthright citizenship, deporting all illegals and thinking about economic, other ways, to incentivize them to self-deport, building the wall and militarizing it with state of the art technology, personnel; instating a moratorium on all immigration, and revising the tests for citizenship, voting, other basic privileges of American life. Long before his stint in government, Ingrassia was a right-wing firebrand. A 30-year-old lawyer and right-wing commentator, he has referred to himself as 'Trump's favorite Substacker' and spent years writing articles praising Trump. He has ties to far-right figures and those with fringe beliefs. Last summer, Ingrassia appeared at a rally organized by far-right provocateur Nick Fuentes, whom Ingrassia has advocated for in the past. He also has a relationship with Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, a January 6 rioter who the Justice Department called a 'Nazi sympathizer.' Ingrassia's social media has included 9/11 conspiracy theories and support for Alex Jones, who gained notoriety for denying children were murdered at the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012. He graduated from Cornell Law in 2022. In 2023, Ingrassia worked for McBride Law, a firm that represented far-right influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate when they were facing allegations of rape and human trafficking in Romania and the United Kingdom. The firm filed a defamation lawsuit against one of their accusers that summer. (The Tate brothers have consistently denied these allegations. Proceedings are ongoing in both countries.) Ingrassia was not legally allowed to practice or market himself as a lawyer at the time; the firm referred to him as an Ivy League-educated associate attorney working on the case. He sat for the bar in July 2023 and was admitted to practice in New York on July 30, 2024. After McBride, he worked as a communications director for the conservative nonprofit National Constitutional Law Union and occasionally wrote articles for the right-wing site Gateway Pundit. He left both positions after taking a job in January as a presidential liaison to the Department of Justice in January. After a few months, however, he was reassigned from the Justice Department to another agency amid reports of administration infighting. Reporting from ABC suggested his advocacy for the department to hire John Pierce, his old boss at the National Constitutional Law Union, played a role. Pierce represented many January 6 rioters. During his time as a criminal defense attorney, Pierce failed to show up to court, sent in a co-counsel who wasn't authorized to practice law, forgot how many clients he had, and was fired by multiple defendants. According to ABC, Ingrassia wanted Pierce to run the pardon office at the Justice Department. Now, with his elevation to the Office of Special Counsel, Ingrassia could be back at the Justice Department.

Thune's plans for the fall shutdown fight
Thune's plans for the fall shutdown fight

Politico

time2 hours ago

  • Politico

Thune's plans for the fall shutdown fight

Senate Majority Leader John Thune says Congress will need a short-term spending bill to prevent a shutdown Oct. 1, with leadership allies likely to push for a patch running up until the holidays. The South Dakota Republican's comments in an interview Wednesday reveal how Republicans are already thinking about their strategy for the fall funding fight, with Thune in particular expected to face divisions within his own party about what to do. And while Thune acknowledged that Republicans tasked with writing the funding bills will want a short-term stopgap, some GOP hardliners are already pushing for a year-long measure that just extends current funding levels — something Thune cautioned is 'never … a very good solution.' 'It locks in spending from the last year,' he said. 'You don't get a chance to make judgments or decisions.' Thune's goal, instead, is to get as many of the 12 annual funding bills as possible signed into law by Oct. 1, and then use a more limited stopgap measure to temporarily cover the rest of the federal government. The Senate is moving its first tranche of funding bills this week, and Thune said he wanted to pass another three or four in September, which would let the chamber bless at least half of the dozen appropriations measures in time for the shutdown deadline. But Thune will need to negotiate not only with his own members but also Republicans in the House, where appropriators are drafting bills that make deeper cuts than many of those being written in the Senate. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), in a separate interview Wednesday, suggested the House and Senate could use the August recess to discuss resolving differences in their funding measures: 'We want to try to get a negotiated appropriations process. And we still have that ability.' Scalise also agreed with Thune that a stopgap funding bill would not be 'ideal,' as it would keep the previous administration's policies in place and also would be 'bad for defense.' Hanging over it all is the White House's push to send another request to claw back funding. A White House aide said this week that Congress could soon receive a request to greenlight cuts to education programs . Thune said he hasn't yet had conversations with the White House about what should be in that second rescissions package and hasn't 'had a lot of visibility into it other than kind of general categories.' Senate Democrats are still working out their own shutdown strategy , and many of them are warning that Republicans shouldn't bank on Democratic support for a government funding bill this fall if Republicans continue to pursue party-line spending tactics. Some Democrats say they should make their support for a government funding bill conditional on Republicans promising not to vote on any more rescissions bills. Thune, however, said Wednesday that he 'can't, probably, guarantee that.' He also sidestepped whether he believed White House budget director Russ Vought should wait until after the government funding deadline to send over another claw-back request, but added: 'I just want to see us have an appropriations process.' Meredith Lee Hill contributed reporting.

What to know as DOJ battles over Alina Habba's successor in New Jersey
What to know as DOJ battles over Alina Habba's successor in New Jersey

The Hill

time2 hours ago

  • The Hill

What to know as DOJ battles over Alina Habba's successor in New Jersey

President Trump's war with the judiciary escalated Tuesday with the firing of an attorney named by federal judges to replace Alina Habba, the loyalist he tapped as New Jersey's top federal prosecutor. The judges refused to extend Habba's temporary tenure as U.S. Attorney, instead invoking a seldom used power to appoint their own pick. But Attorney General Pam Bondi quickly intervened, shunning the 'politically minded judges' for dumping Habba and terminating their selected successor. It's a new front in the ongoing tug-of-war between the executive and judicial branches, as the courts push back against the president's most controversial appointments and the Trump administration doubles down. 'This is ultimately a bit of a game of chicken, where I suspect that the administration has the upper hand,' said Jonathan Petkun, a law professor at Duke University who has researched judicial administrative power. Here's what to know. New Jersey US attorney's office thrown in disarray The back-and-forth has muddied the waters regarding the office's leadership. After a private vote Monday, U.S. District Court of New Jersey judges declined to retain Habba as the state's top federal prosecutor as the clock on her interim status runs out. It issued a standing order naming attorney Desiree Leigh Grace to the role — an unusual move. Habba represented Trump in several high-profile civil cases and, most recently, worked in the White House as a counselor to the president. The judges had the authority to keep Habba in her role as U.S. attorney indefinitely, until her Senate confirmation, but they declined to do so. Federal law lets district courts appoint an interim U.S. attorney to fill the role if the roughly 4-month temporary stint ends before the president's choice is confirmed. Hours later, Bondi announced she fired Grace in response, citing the judges' decision. 'This Department of Justice does not tolerate rogue judges — especially when they threaten the President's core Article II powers,' Bondi wrote on X. Judges, DOJ test power The Justice Department's willingness to go to bat for individual U.S. Attorneys speaks to Trump's sharp focus on the agency that he once deemed the 'Department of Injustice,' amid two federal criminal cases the government mounted against him. Trump's close control of the agency exceeds the oversight of previous presidencies, including his own first administration. He has packed the government's legal offices with close allies, several of whom have personally represented him. 'We are seeing a president who is applying a lot of loyalty tests,' Petkun said. 'And I think he's discovered that having to seek the advice and consent of the Senate is tiresome.' A similar showdown played out last week in the Northern District of New York, where judges refused to extend the interim term of Trump's pick for chief federal prosecutor there, John Sarcone III. To get around their decision, Sarcone was named both 'special attorney' to Bondi and the district's first assistant, a move that endows him with the same powers as U.S. attorney indefinitely. The move comes straight from the pages of a playbook Trump's administration has drawn from since he returned to the White House, walking right up to the line where the practical effect of the law gets fuzzy. But judges don't typically subvert the president's selections for U.S. attorneys, either. 'There's lots of 'unusual' going on,' said Mitchell Epner, a former federal prosecutor in New Jersey who now works as a white-collar litigator in New York. During Trump's first term, the 120-day clock ran out for his choice for New Jersey's U.S. attorney then, too. But the judges let Craig Carpenito, Trump's nominee, continue in the role. 'What's unusual is that when the 120 days is coming to an end here, instead of the court saying, 'Okay, the person who was appointed as the acting will continue in the job,' the Court has said, 'No, we're appointing somebody else,'' Epner said. The judges' rejection of Habba follows her contentious trial period, in which two Democratic public officials faced criminal charges over an incident at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka (D) faced a trespass charge, which has since been dropped, and Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) faces three counts of assaulting, resisting, impeding and interfering with a federal officer, to which she pleaded not guilty. At the hearing dismissing the charge against Baraka, one judge on the court suggested his arrest amounted to a 'worrisome misstep' by the office. Trump's administration has not been deterred, with officials including Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche expressing full confidence in Habba and a total lack thereof in the court. 'They consider themselves in a battle, if not a war, with the judiciary — which is madness,' University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias said. Legal battle looms The face-off sets up a legal battle that could redefine the power the judiciary can exercise over the White House and vice versa. Epner said he does not believe the issue has been litigated before, and while it remains to be seen whether a legal fight will ensue, real questions remain about the Justice Department's ability to remove Grace. 'It's not clear to me that Attorney General Bondi had the authority to fire the person who was appointed by the court,' he said. 'I'm confident that the president could.' The Justice Department's arsenal amounts to the fact that Bondi is the 'boss,' Petkun said. All federal prosecutors ultimately report to her, meaning that if Grace were to assume the role as the judges ruled, her subordinates could face discipline for following Grace's directives. The judges, on the other hand, don't have any mechanism to enforce their order, Tobias said. 'And I'm not sure they're really inclined to even try to do that,' he added. 'You know, lest it really deteriorate.' Whether the power struggle between the two branches is tested could come down to if Grace herself decides to push back. The closest comparison came during Trump's first term, when he sought to fire Geoffrey Berman, who became U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York after the district's judges appointed him to the role following his 120-day interim term. Berman, who was blindsided by then-Attorney General Bill Barr's announcement of his resignation, initially resisted, writing in a statement that he had 'no intention' of quitting. The fight only ended when Berman acquiesced, after Barr agreed to install the lawyer's deputy to the post. Trump has fired other independent agency officials during his second presidency, many of whom challenged their removals in the courts. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court's conservative majority is 'hungry' for cases that 'clamp down' on separation of powers, Petkun said, and the justices have not yet weighed the statute dictating the power for an attorney general versus a court to make such appointments. 'I suspect, honestly, it is largely up to what is in Desiree Leigh Grace's head,' he said. 'Is she going to acquiesce to this?'

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