Trump’s return to Butler marked by heightened security and reflective supporters

(PHOENIX) — President Joe Biden was in Arizona on Friday to apologize to Native Americans for the federal government forcing Indian children into boarding schools where the White House said they were abused and deprived of their cultural identity.

Departing the White House Thursday, Biden said he was going to Arizona “to do something that should have been done a long time ago.”

He said he would make “a formal apology to the Indian nations for the way we treated their children for so many years.”

The White House called his trip to Gila River Indian Community outside Phoenix — his first to Indian Country as president — “historic.”

Officials said he will discuss the Biden-Harris administration’s record of delivering for tribal communities, including keeping his promise to visit the swing state, which is happening close to Election Day.

“The president also believes that to usher in the next era of the Federal-Tribal relationships we need to fully acknowledge the harms of the past,” the White House said. 

“For over 150 years, the federal government ran boarding schools that forcibly removed generations of Native children from their homes to boarding schools often far away. Native children at these schools endured physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, and, as detailed in the Federal Indian Boarding School Investigative Report by the Department of the Interior (DOI), at least 973 children died in these schools,” the White House said.

“The federally-run Indian boarding school system was designed to assimilate Native Americans by destroying Native culture, language, and identity through harsh militaristic and assimilationist methods,” it said.

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(WASHINGTON) — The U.S. Supreme Court, faced with sagging public confidence and a deepening perception its decisions are politically-motivated, could soon play a critical role in how some 2024 presidential ballots are cast and counted and, potentially, how contested election results are certified.

“As prepared as anyone can be,” said Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court’s junior justice, when asked recently about the flood of election-related lawsuits headed toward the high court.

Hundreds of state and federal cases involving disputes over the legitimacy of state voter rolls, access to voting places, and procedures for counting ballots are currently pending. A majority of them were brought by Republicans.

“It is a deluge,” said Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank tracking the unprecedented volume of election-year litigation. “It is a strategy to sow disinformation and chaos in the election system.”

Many of the lawsuits, predicated on “conspiracy theories” and advancing tenuous legal arguments, will ultimately be tossed out on technical grounds, Weiser said. But some may reach the justices with the potential to alter voting procedures in the final weeks of the campaign, depending on how they rule.

In one closely-watched case from Mississippi, the Republican National Committee has asked a conservative federal appeals court panel to prohibit the counting of mail ballots that arrive after Election Day, even if they are postmarked on or before Nov. 5. Roughly 20 states have long standing laws permitting late-arriving ballots, including Nevada, Virginia and Ohio.

“They’re saying federal law says election day means election day, which means that anything that comes afterwards was not on election day,” Weiser said of the GOP effort. “The argument has been raised in many cases across the country, and the courts have been routinely rejecting it. But given the context of the players involved, there’s now not a 0% risk that this could happen.”

In North Carolina, Republicans have sued state election officials seeking to remove 225,000 voters ahead of Election Day, claiming voter registration forms lacked the required identification information. The case is among more than three dozen GOP-led suits attempting to purge alleged ineligible voters, according to Democracy Docket, a left-leaning group tracking the litigation.

“It doesn’t strike me as implausible that you would see a case like that sharply before the Supreme Court in late October,” said University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq.

While the justices have generally sought to avoid interference in state voter registration policies and election procedures close to an election — a concept known as the Purcell Principle — they have occasionally issued rulings that have resulted in major changes.

In the past few weeks, the court has issued decisions allowing Arizona to require proof of citizenship for state voter registration and rejecting Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein’s bid to appear on the Nevada ballot.

“They’ve never really explained what is the ‘status quo’ and what is ‘last minute,’ and they have been incredibly inconsistent in how they applied [Purcell],” said Caroline Fredrickson, a Georgetown law professor and former president of the American Constitution Society.

Other possible scenarios for Supreme Court involvement in the 2024 election could unfold after Nov. 5, as local and state election officials tabulate ballots and certify results.

“Imagine a state such as Georgia, where you have a state election board that has in the past weeks evinced a certain tendency to invite and foment election related litigation, resisting certification of a slate of presidential electors that the state election board disfavors,” said Huq. “What happens then? Perhaps the Supreme Court would be called in to tell us.”

The Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 (ECRA) mandates that states must certify their results by Dec. 11, but does not spell out what would happen if they do not do so. There could be litigation to resolve the appointment of a state’s electors for president by Dec. 16 when the Electoral College meets to cast votes.

The law explicitly directs disputes over certification to a three-judge panel for resolution with the U.S. Supreme Court getting the final word.

“It’s certainly contemplated as a second layer fail-safe,” said Weiser, “but I’m relatively confident that all the earlier layer fail-safes are going to hold and that we’re not going to be in that scenario.”

The court could also be asked to weigh in on any attempt by members of Congress to disqualify former President Donald Trump from a second term, if he were to win the election, during certification of the electoral vote on Jan. 6, 2025.

In the case Trump v. Anderson last year, the justices unanimously ruled that states could not disqualify a presidential candidate as an “insurrectionist” under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, but it left open a federal process to make that determination.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment says anyone who took an oath “as an officer of the United States to support the Constitution” and who then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” or gave “aid or comfort to the enemy” cannot hold office.

Trump’s critics allege he clearly violated Section 3 given his connection to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol and efforts to block certification of President Joe Biden’s election victory.

Under the ECRA, if one-fifth of the members of the House and Senate voted to object to certification of Trump’s electors on the grounds that he is ineligible to hold office, that decision could ultimately be reviewed by the Supreme Court.

“You could imagine a kind of Bush v Gore style, very, very rapid sequence of motions or petitions being filed and making their way through the court system,” said Huq. “I can imagine that happening, although I think it’s unlikely. But I suspect the Supreme Court would make short work of it.”

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Vivek Ramaswamy, a former presidential candidate and ally of Donald Trump, said the president-elect would bring the country together while also defending Trump’s immigration plan for mass deportations.

Speaking to “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl, Ramaswamy urged Democrats to give Trump a chance in office and called on them to resist efforts to cast him as a threat to democracy.

“What you’re hearing from Donald Trump is he is going to be a president for all Americans. He is a guy who, in that first term, he had crowds chanting ‘lock her up’ for Hillary Clinton. He didn’t prosecute her. I think Donald Trump is focused on what makes people’s lives better. And actually, my message to Democrats out there, even those who didn’t vote for Donald Trump, is to give him a chance to actually make your life better,” Ramaswamy said.

“I think it’s time to turn the page on a lot of these histrionics, or Hitler comparisons,” he added, before later saying that “success is unifying. Nothing’s going to unite this country more than economic growth.”

Ramaswamy ran against the former and now president-elect in the 2024 GOP primary as a culture warrior in Trump’s image, though he ended his campaign the night of the Iowa caucuses and endorsed the former president.

On Sunday, he also defended Trump’s vow for a mass deportation force, predicting that the tougher enforcement measures will also lead to undocumented immigrants leaving the country on their own.

“Donald Trump’s campaign promise was the largest mass deportation in American history, and he’s going to keep that promise,” Ramaswamy said. “Not an iota, not a cent of government spending should go to subsidize this, not to sanctuary cities, not to federal aid to people who are in this country illegally, and we’re going to see a large number, by the millions, of self-deportations as well.”

Pressed by Karl on the fate of the so-called “Dreamers” — people who were brought to the United States as children without valid documentation — Ramaswamy declined to explicitly say how the incoming administration would approach this group of undocumented immigrants, which includes many adults who have spent most of their life in the U.S. During his first term, the Trump administration attempted to rescind the Obama-era program that allowed such migrants to stay and work in the country.

“I say this as the kid of legal immigrants to this country, as the proud child of legal immigrants to the United States of America. If your first act of entering this country broke the law, that doesn’t allow you to remain in this country,” Ramaswamy said. “One is, no migration without consent. Think about your nation like a body. Number two is that consent should only be granted, and should be granted to migrants who benefit the United States of America. But those who enter without consent must be removed.”

As a vocal Trump ally, Ramaswamy is thought of as a potential future member of the Trump administration, though he did not specify what role would interest him.

“There’s a couple great options on the table. I want to have the biggest possible impact on this country. We’re not going to sort that out in the press… we’re having some high-impact discussions.”

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