News bits: A debt limit wild card?; Etc.

The Hill write about a court case filed by National Association of Government Employees that claims (1) the debt ceiling law is unconstitutional, and (2) the law should be suspended. This lawsuit has nothing to do with the bickering between Hose Republicans and Biden over the debt limit. This is an independent attempt to get existing law nullified. The Hill writes:

A federal judge late this month will hear arguments involving the debt limit law and whether it is unconstitutional and should be suspended.

The hearing, set for May 31 at 2 p.m. before U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns, will come hours ahead of when the Biden administration warns the federal government could run out of funds to pay its obligations.

The National Association of Government Employees (NAGE) earlier this month sued over the law that sets the nation’s debt limit, arguing it presents separation-of-powers issues. Yellen and President Biden were named as defendants.

If the limit is reached, NAGE contends Biden would be forced to take over Congress’s spending authority by deciding which payments to prioritize over others. It also would effectively amount to a line-item veto, the union argues, which the Supreme Court has previously rejected.

This strikes me as strange. The union did not argue invalidity of existing debt ceiling law on the basis of the 14th Amendment. How much legal traction the separation of power argument might have is not clear to me. Maybe the union had to rely on this argument because it did not have standing to sue for invalidity on the basis of the 14th A.

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The Catholic church and its sex and inconvenient truth problem: Hundreds of Catholic clergy in Illinois sexually abused thousands of children, AG finds . . . . investigators found that 451 clergy sexually abused nearly 2,000 children since 1950 — far more than the 103 individuals the church had named when the state review began in 2018.

I thought that you must not lie was something in the Bible that could not be ignored. Guess I was mistaken. Too bad there wasn't a commandment that said you most not rape. Of course, that would have been ignored too. Those feisty priests and their libidos. That feisty church and its lies.

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Christian nationalists rise up to defend hate speech and lies: Religion News Service reports: "The National Religious Broadcasters, an association of Christian media outlets, has joined a lawsuit seeking to block a California law that requires social media companies to publish their policies on removing hate speech from their platforms. .... Under the law, companies must disclose in detail how they remove content, including hate speech, disinformation, extremism, harassment and foreign political interference. They are also required to submit terms of service reports to the state attorney general by Jan. 1, 2024. Fines for noncompliance were set at up to $15,000 per violation per day."

The propaganda spin is blatant and shameless. Here, Christian Taliban theocrats claim that publishing policies on removing hate speech and disinformation is suppressing free speech. That can easily be seen as an implicit admission that Christian nationalist media relies heavily on hate speech and disinformation to spread the infinite love of Jesus on the flock and America.