In the wake of Donald Trump’s felony convictions, House Speaker Mike Johnson told his GOP conference this week that he has a “three-pronged approach” in mind to respond to the former president’s prosecutions. The first involves “the appropriations process” — Republicans want to defund prosecutors they don’t like — and another prong relates to “oversight,” which refers to another round of partisan, conspiratorial investigations.
But the Louisiana congressman also vowed this week to make use of “the legislative process, through bills that will be advancing through our committees and put it on the floor for passage.”
And what, pray tell, might these bills entail? Axios reported this week:
House conservatives are pressuring Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) for a vote on legislation aimed at showing their allegiance to former President Trump after his historic criminal conviction, Axios has learned. … Conservatives want a floor vote on a bill that would allow current or former presidents to move any state case brought against them — such as the one in New York that resulted in Trump’s conviction — to federal court, according to multiple House Republican sources.
For those who still believe that the Republican Party is committed to states’ rights, I have some very bad news.
There’s no great mystery here: Local prosecutors in New York and Georgia indicted Trump — among others — and the cases went to state courts. For the former president and his partisan allies, this created an obvious problem: Even if Trump were to return to power, he wouldn’t be able to pardon himself from state charges and/or convictions.
If, however, congressional Republicans were to pass a bill empowering the former president to move the cases to federal courts, it would (a) create an opportunity for the issues to be assigned to Trump-appointed loyalists in the federal judiciary; and (b) open the door to Trump pardoning himself in a prospective second term. The push comes on the heels of a recent Rolling Stone report that said the former president had spoken to GOP lawmakers about legislation along these lines. Would the bill be constitutional? Probably not. Could it pass sometime this year? That seems extraordinarily unlikely, given the Democratic majority in the Senate. But House Republicans appear likely to pursue the plan anyway — a floor vote in the coming months is a safe bet — and if the party is able to seize control of the federal levers of power in the 2024 elections, no one will be surprised if this legislation receives attention in early 2025.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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