checking in on Fox News

Stephen Miller encouraged Texas Republican state legislators to challenge a decades-old U.S. Supreme Court precedent

The White House deputy chief of staff views GOP-led state legislatures as a workaround to get anti-immigration laws on the books that wouldn't need to pass through the gridlock in Congress, especially as Republicans at this point appear likely to lose their House majority and possibly the Senate, reported the New York Times.

“He sees conservative states like Texas and Florida can be partners with the federal government,” said state Rep. Tom Oliverson, chairman of the Texas House Republican Caucus. “We can be a place where some of those ideas can be tried out because they’re difficult to do at the federal level.”

Miller met with Texas Republicans for more than four hours and demanded to know why the GOP-dominated legislature had not passed a bill to restrict public school funding to children who are citizens or are “lawfully present in the United States," which would break a precedent set in 1982 by a ruling in Plyler v. Doe that found states must pay for elementary school education for children regardless of their immigration status.

“There’s a lot of people that believe that that ruling has some pretty faulty logic associated with it,” Oliverson said. “He challenged us, and he encouraged us, and he asked us to partner with him."

Miller's proposal, if passed into state law, would cut education funding for an estimated 100,000 students out of more than 5.5 million schoolchildren in the state, the Times reported. It appears to be intended as a model for other red states to follow, according to the report.

"[It seems to be an effort from the White House to pressure lawmakers into passing extreme immigration policies that don’t reflect the needs of our state," said state Rep. Ramon Romero, a Democrat and the chair of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus.

Miller led off the meeting, which included Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, with a loyalty test that landed awkwardly, according to Oliverson.

"Do we have a RINO problem in Texas?” he said, using an acronym for “Republican in name only” that is used by conservatives to disparage party moderates.

“There was no answer — it was just uncomfortable silence,” Oliverson said.

The liberal voting rights outlet Democracy Docket exposed a pattern of extreme anti-voting and conspiracy theorist beliefs by Chad Bianco, the pro-Trump sheriff of Riverside County, California, who is currently running for governor.

Bianco is currently in a high-profile clash with California state officials after he seized 650,000 ballots from the Proposition 50 referendum, which established a new mid-decade congressional map to draw out five Republicans in retaliation for GOP efforts to do the same to Democrats in Texas. Even some Republican leaders in the state have condemned his actions.

But Bianco's seizure of ballots, evidently to try to investigate baseless allegations of fraud, is part of a broader pattern of his disdain for democracy.

"'That’s why some people should never be allowed to vote,' the sheriff wrote Wednesday in response to a commentary video about the Iran war on the social media site," said the report. This "wasn't an isolated incident," the report said, as "Over the past months, Bianco published numerous comments and posts on social media promoting false claims that elections are rigged and Democrats rely on illegal voters to win races."

Among other things, Bianco also claimed that Democrats have “created an environment where cheating and illegal voting is keeping them in office,” and that “Non citizens can vote, you can vote for someone else even if they are dead, people can vote multiple times with different names.”

There is no evidence to support any of this; all of these things are illegal and have been prosecuted in the rare cases they have occurred.

Bianco, who has been characterized by opponents as having one of the worst crime-solving records and some of the deadliest jails in California, is a former member of the Oath Keepers paramilitary and is affiliated with the "Constitutional Sheriffs" movement, a fringe group that believes God delegates divine legal authority to sheriffs to overrule federal law they disapprove of. In 2024, this group was preparing a scheme to block Democrats from taking power if they won the election.