1/ Trump’s businesses received at least $7.8 million from foreign governments – most of it from China – during his time in office, according to a report by the House Oversight Committee. During the two-year period that the committee was able to review, at least 20 foreign government paid millions to Trump’s hotels in Washington, D.C., Las Vegas, New York’s Trump Tower, and Trump World Tower. Jamie Raskin, the ranking member of the Oversight Committee, said that the $7.8 million is “almost certainly only a fraction of Trump’s harvest of unlawful foreign state money, but this figure in itself is a scandal and a decisive spur to action.” The report argues that the payments violated the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause, which prohibits a president from accepting money, payments or gifts “of any kind whatever” from foreign governments and monarchs unless he obtains “the consent of the Congress” to do so. Trump never went to Congress to seek consent. The evidence that Trump’s businesses profited from foreign governments during his presidency is the same conduct that House Republicans have unsuccessfully used as the basis of their impeachment inquiry into Biden. The Republican’s yearlong investigation has failed to produce evidence of anything approaching high crimes or misdemeanors. (New York Times / CNN / Washington Post / NBC News / Bloomberg / Wall Street Journal / Politico)

2/ The Justice Department sued Texas over the state’s new law that would allow police to arrest, jail, and prosecute migrants who illegally enter the U.S. The state law makes it a misdemeanor to illegally cross the border and a second-degree felony for illegal re-entry, with punishments ranging from 180 days in jail to 20 years in prison. It also allows judges in Texas to issue de facto deportation orders. The Justice Department argued that the Constitution assigns the federal government – not individual states – the authority to regulate immigration and manage international borders. “Texas cannot run its own immigration system,” the Justice Department wrote in the lawsuit. “Under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution and longstanding Supreme Court precedent, states cannot adopt immigration laws that interfere with the framework enacted by Congress.” (