Trump’s HEALTH COLLAPSES in Front of World DURING WAR!!!

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.

With just a month until a key Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act spying power expires, US House Speaker Mike Johnson was planning to try to push through reauthorization legislation next week, but the Louisiana Republican leader is now reportedly delaying the vote while “still dealing with a dozen or so Republican members who want reforms.”

Privacy advocates and lawmakers across the political spectrum have long called for reforms to FISA’s Section 702, which empowers the US government to surveil electronic communications of noncitizens located outside the United States to acquire foreign intelligence information, without a warrant.

Citing three unnamed sources familiar with discussions in the House of Representatives, Politico reported Friday that “with a GOP hard-liner revolt over warrantless surveillance threatening to tank the legislation,” Johnson “will instead work through the remaining issues over the upcoming two-week recess and try to put the extension on the floor the week of April 14.”

Welcoming the development, Demand Progress executive director Sean Vitka said in a statement that “Speaker Johnson is backing away from his plan to ram through a FISA reauthorization vote next week because he knows his members don’t want it and the American people don’t want it.”

“Republicans, Democrats, and independents all overwhelmingly want Congress to take serious action to protect privacy—in particular against AI and data brokers—and oppose any efforts to rubber-stamp the government’s warrantless mass surveillance powers as is,” Vitka continued.

“Before any vote on reauthorizing FISA,” he added, “Congress must first enact real protections for Americans’ privacy, in particular by closing the data broker loophole to prevent the government from circumventing the courts and independent oversight through the purchase of Americans’ private location, web browsing, and other sensitive information.”

Various bills, including the bipartisan Security and Freedom Enhancement (SAFE) Act introduced last month by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), would close the loophole that agencies use to buy their way around the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, which is supposed to protect Americans against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Demand Progress has endorsed that bill, and on Thursday partnered with the Project On Government Oversight and over 130 other artificial intelligence and civil rights groups for a letter urging Republican and Democratic congressional leaders to impose “much-needed privacy protections against government agencies’ warrantless mass surveillance of people in the United States.”

President Donald Trump and his pro-spying deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, have fought for a “clean” reauthorization, but the GOP has slim majorities in both chambers of Congress. In the House, Johnson can only afford to lose two votes, and in the Senate, most bills require at least some Democratic support to get to the president’s desk.

The conduct of Trump’s second administration has fueled calls for reform. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), a member of the House Judiciary Committee, said in a Thursday statement that “as the Trump administration continues to run roughshod over our Constitution, we cannot continue to give them a further opening to sacrifice our civil liberties in the name of national security. We cannot give Stephen Miller a blank check to conduct domestic surveillance in violation of the Fourth Amendment.”

“I have been working on essential reforms to FISA across administrations, and I have not wavered—whether it is a Democratic or Republican president,” she noted. “This has always been a bipartisan issue for good reason. Americans across political parties care deeply about privacy and not being surveilled. Congress has a duty to protect those fundamental constitutional liberties. Any attempt to push forward a ‘clean’ reauthorization of Section 702 will put our private, sensitive data at risk.”

Jayapal stressed that “this Trump administration has been particularly brazen in its use of domestic surveillance to suppress our constitutional rights and dissent. In just the last six weeks, the administration has blacklisted Anthropic for refusing to stand down on its requirement that its technology not be used for the mass surveillance of Americans, and we learned that the Department of Justice surveilled me—and likely many other members—while reviewing the Epstein files, seeking justice for survivors.”

“In Minnesota, federal immigration agents have surveilled and intimidated US citizens exercising their First Amendment rights to document agents’ unlawful actions,” the congresswoman noted. “It is time to reform FISA, ensure our Fourth Amendment protections are guaranteed, and stop the government surveillance of Americans.”