The "Ted Cruz curse" reached new heights this week with his appearance at the 2024 Sugar Bowl between Texas and Washington setting social media abuzz with claims of a jinx.

Some sports fans claimed that when Cruz attends a sporting event, the team he is supporting gets cursed and loses the game. That hypothesis has held up over the past few months.

The U.S. Senator watched Alabama beat Texas A&M in College Station in October, talking with media prior to the game about NIL legislation. He then watched all of the Astros losses in the 2023 postseason, which coincided with the in-state rival Texas Rangers winning the World Series. Cruz capped off this stretch watching the Longhorns last-ditch effort to beat Washington fall short in the College Football Playoff Semifinal.

He also attended Texas State's upset of Baylor in September.....

Speculation about a curse first gained popularity about a half-decade ago. Cruz attended Game 7 of the 2018 Western Conference Finals, which saw the Rockets miss 27 straight 3-pointers and get eliminated by the Golden State Warriors. The next year, Cruz posted on Twitter, now known as X, a photo of him at the NCAA Men's Basketball National Championship game between Texas Tech and Virginia. He posted the photo with the Red Raiders up by one point with 35 seconds remaining. Texas Tech lost in overtime.

The "Ted Cruz curse" reached new heights this week with his appearance at the 2024 Sugar Bowl between Texas and Washington setting social media abuzz with claims of a jinx.

Some sports fans claimed that when Cruz attends a sporting event, the team he is supporting gets cursed and loses the game. That hypothesis has held up over the past few months.

The U.S. Senator watched Alabama beat Texas A&M in College Station in October, talking with media prior to the game about NIL legislation. He then watched all of the Astros losses in the 2023 postseason, which coincided with the in-state rival Texas Rangers winning the World Series. Cruz capped off this stretch watching the Longhorns last-ditch effort to beat Washington fall short in the College Football Playoff Semifinal.

He also attended Texas State's upset of Baylor in September.....

Speculation about a curse first gained popularity about a half-decade ago. Cruz attended Game 7 of the 2018 Western Conference Finals, which saw the Rockets miss 27 straight 3-pointers and get eliminated by the Golden State Warriors. The next year, Cruz posted on Twitter, now known as X, a photo of him at the NCAA Men's Basketball National Championship game between Texas Tech and Virginia. He posted the photo with the Red Raiders up by one point with 35 seconds remaining. Texas Tech lost in overtime.

New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella (R) issued a cease-and-desist order on Monday to the Democratic National Committee and warned Democratic officials to stop telling voters the state’s primary is “meaningless,” which Formella said violates the state’s voter suppression laws.

In the letter — addressed to DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee (RBC) co-chairs Minyon Moore and James Roosevelt Jr. — Formella took issue with their Jan. 5 letter to the New Hampshire Democratic Party (NHDP) advising the state party to “educate the public” that the state’s Jan. 23 primary is “a non-binding presidential preference event and is meaningless.”

“Regardless of whether the DNC refuses to award delegates to the party’s national convention based on the results of the January 23, 2024, New Hampshire democratic Presidential Primary Election, this New Hampshire election is not ‘meaningless,’” read the Monday letter to the DNC and RBC.

It said the DNC committee’s “statements to the contrary are false, deceptive, and misleading” and such statements made to people eligible to vote in the state “constitutes an attempt to prevent or deter New Hampshire voters from participating in the January 23, 2024, New Hampshire democratic Presidential Primary Election, in violation of RSA 659:40, III.”

— Police and fire trucks showed up Sunday night at the house of Tanya Chutkan, the federal judge overseeing former President Donald Trump’s election interference case after she appeared to be the target of an attempted "swatting" attack.

Police confirmed to NBC News that they responded to false reports of a shooting at a house that a witness identified as Chutkan's home. A law enforcement official also confirmed that it was Chutkan’s home and that she was home when police arrived at her residence.

A police report obtained by NBC News said that officers with the Metropolitan Police Department responded to a call just after 10 p.m. ET that referenced a shooting that occurred at the location. Once authorities arrived at the scene, an unnamed subject said she "was not injured and that there was no one in her home."....

Chutkan herself has also faced threats — a Texas woman, Abigail Jo Shry, 43, was arrested and charged last August with transmitting a threat to injure a person via interstate commerce. The affidavit alleged that the woman called Chutkan on Aug. 5 and left a “threatening voicemail message” for her.

Former President Donald Trump on Monday suggested that if he is re-elected he would have President Joe Biden indicted, a day before an appeals court hears arguments on his claim that presidential immunity protects him from prosecution for his role in the Jan. 6 attack.

In a post to his Truth Social platform early Monday, Trump said he plans to attend oral arguments on his presidential immunity claim before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Tuesday, and claimed that it was his obligation as president to find voter fraud.

“Of course I was entitled, as President of the United States and Commander in Chief, to Immunity. I wasn’t campaigning, the Election was long over,” he wrote. “I was looking for voter fraud, and finding it, which is my obligation to do, and otherwise running running our Country.”

Trump then argued that, if his attempts to avoid prosecution over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election are unsuccessful, Biden shouldn’t be entitled to presidential immunity either.

“If I don’t get Immunity, then Crooked Joe Biden doesn’t get Immunity,” Trump wrote, before criticizing the Biden administration for the record number of migrants crossing into the U.S. southern border, its 2021 decision to pull troops from Afghanistan and baseless claims of Biden engaging in shady business practices with foreign countries.

The former chair of the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol issued a warning about the state of the country on the third anniversary of the riot.

“In the three years since the deadly January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, many of us have worked tirelessly to uncover and guard against the threats to American democracy that interrupted the peaceful transfer of power on that horrific day,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said in a Saturday press release. “However, our country is still in peril, and there is much more we must do to protect it.”

“Today, I reflect on the courage and sacrifices of law enforcement officers and other personnel who protect and preserve the Capitol,” Thompson continued. “They held the line when American democracy was under threat — and some sadly lost their lives.”

In his first campaign speech of the year on Friday, President Biden highlighted the Jan. 6 attack in an attempt to cement a point about former President Trump and other Republicans espousing a kind of extremism that was seen by the world on that day.

“Democracy is on the ballot. Your freedom is on the ballot,” Biden said in the speech, delivered near Valley Forge, Pa.

Last month, Judge Tanya Chutkan (correctly) rejected Trump’s motions to dismiss special counsel Jack Smith’s grand jury indictment on grounds including that he was immune from prosecution. In turn, Trump brought what’s known as an “interlocutory” appeal — meaning an immediate appeal before a final judgment in the lower court. With the agreement of both sides, Chutkan stayed “any further proceedings that would move this case towards trial or impose additional burdens of litigation” on Trump until the appeal is decided by the D.C. Circuit (and potentially the Supreme Court).....

There is strong Supreme Court precedent indicating that appellate courts do not have jurisdiction to hear Trump’s immunity appeal now. In Midland Asphalt Corp. v. United States, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for a unanimous court, said that a trial court’s decision is not immediately appealable unless the claim “rests upon an explicit statutory or constitutional guarantee that trial will not occur.” In 2010, future Justice Neil Gorsuch, then a judge on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, succinctly encapsulated the Midland Asphalt rule: “Only when a statutory or constitutional provision itself contains a guarantee that a trial will not occur — may courts of appeals intervene prior to a final judgment to review the defendant’s claimed ‘right not to be tried.’”

In Midland Asphalt, the court identified only two constitutional guarantees against trial that had historically been considered explicit enough to warrant interlocutory appeal: the Speech or Debate Clause (unique protections expressly afforded to members of Congress) and the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment. By contrast, one of the court’s examples of a ruling not subject to interlocutory appeal was the denial of a claim of prosecutorial immunity. Chutkan’s denial of Trump’s claim of presidential immunity should be treated in the same manner.

As a new amicus brief filed by American Oversight argues, Trump’s assertion of presidential immunity rests on no explicit constitutional or statutory guarantee against trial, and so the D.C. Circuit should end the appeal and lift the stay. (One of the authors, Sawyer, is the executive director of American Oversight.) The D.C. Circuit has repeatedly applied Midland Asphalt in dismissing interlocutory appeals of immunity claims, including in a case where a former Cabinet secretary argued that he was immune on “structural separation of powers grounds,” like those that Trump invokes as the basis of his own alleged immunity. ....

Therefore, the D.C. Circuit should find that Trump’s immunity appeal is premature and the trial must commence first, and also, alternatively, that presidential immunity does not exist. Doing so would prevent further unnecessary delay, in the event the Supreme Court believes that an interlocutory appeal is proper here — as there would already be an appellate ruling on the merits for the court to consider.