Author Archives: weeklysift

Doug Muder is a former mathematician who now writes about politics and religion. He is a frequent contributor to UU World.

Unconstrained and Revolutionary

May 13, 2024 – 10:59 am

Every election is billed as a national turning point. This time that rings true. To supporters, the prospect of Trump 2.0, unconstrained and backed by a disciplined movement of true believers, offers revolutionary promise. To much of the rest of the nation and the world, it represents an alarming risk.

– Eric Cortellessa, “How Far Trump Would Go“

This week’s featured post is “What Trump Would Do“.

On my week off I led a Sunday service at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois. The topic may be of some interest to Sift readers: “Hope, Denial, and Healthy Relationship with the News“.

This week everybody was talking about Trump’s legal problems

As I reported two weeks ago, the prosecution continues to build a very strong case. The fireworks this week were over the testimony of Stormy Daniels, but it’s important to remember where she fits into the overall case: Trump is accused of falsifying business documents to cover up reimbursing Michael Cohen, who paid $130K for Daniels’ agreeing not to tell her story before the 2016 election.

So the actual truth of Daniels account isn’t relevant. The point is that her story would have damaged Trump politically, motivating him to pay her off and cover up doing so. I’ve heard a commentator describe her as an “exhibit” rather than a “witness”, i.e., the important fact is that her story exists. If it’s true, that’s just a bonus.

A great deal of Trump’s lawyer Susan Necheles’ cross-examination of Daniels attempted to make the jury doubt that her story is true. (Personally, I think Daniels sounds credible, and did a good job fending off the attempted slut-shaming.) But the fact that this story would have been damaging (especially in the weeks between the Access Hollywood tape and the election) seems indisputable. Even if you believe Trump’s claim that Daniels made her story up to extort money from him, you can still find him guilty.

After her testimony, Trump’s lawyers asked for a mistrial, on the grounds that the details of her alleged encounter with Trump were unnecessary and prejudiced the jury against him. Judge Merchan denied the motion, essentially saying that the defense had created the problem itself: It invited a detailed account by claiming in its opening statement that Daniels was lying, and failed to object to the questions that elicited the prejudicial information.

As I observed two weeks ago, the defense still tells no plausible story. The only part of the prosecution’s case that isn’t totally nailed down is that Trump knew about the payment and the reimbursement scheme. (This is the one undocumented part of the prosecution’s account. Like a Mafia boss, Trump is famously reluctant to use email or put anything in writing. Cohen will start testifying today about his instructions from Trump, but there are no corroborating documents or other witnesses.) But Trump is the only one with a motive to set the scheme in motion. Otherwise, you have to believe that Cohen completely on his own borrowed $130K to pay Daniels, that Trump CFO Allen Weisselberg came up with the reimbursement plan without telling his boss, and that the notoriously stingy Trump signed over $400K worth of checks to Cohen with no explanation beyond “legal fees”.

That’s a story, I suppose. But I don’t find it plausible enough to create reasonable doubt.

I wish this trial could be televised, because the transcript makes it look like Daniels won the battle of wits with Necheles. When Necheles characterized Daniels’ porn-directing career as “a lot of experience making phony stories about sex”, Daniels shot back: “If that story was untrue, I would’ve written it to be a lot better.”

After Daniels’ testimony, Trump asked for his gag order to be amended to allow him to respond. That motion was denied for an obvious reason: If Trump wants to respond to Daniels sworn testimony, he can take an oath and testify himself, facing the threat of perjury just like she did.

But that’s not what Trump wants. He wants to smear her in forums where he can lie without consequences.

He’s bound to make a similar request after Michael Cohen testifies, and he’ll get the same result. Trump claims it’s unfair that Daniels and Cohen aren’t gagged, so they can criticize him and he can’t respond. But they aren’t under indictment, and they have no record of inciting violence against people they attack online.

Meanwhile, the most open-and-shut case against Trump, the Mar-a-Lago documents case is indefinitely delayed. Judge Cannon plans a public hearing where Trump will get to air his baseless “malicious prosecution” theory.

ProPublica and the New York Times report on a tax problem that might cost Trump $100 million.

If you’ve ever wandered around downtown Chicago, you’ve undoubtedly seen the 92-story Trump International Hotel and Tower, which sits on the Chicago River proclaiming Trump’s name in giant letters. It looks like a monument to wealth and success.

Actually it’s anything but. The Tower opened into the worst of the Great Recession, and has been a money-loser from Day 1. Losing money, though, isn’t entirely bad, because it produces a tax write-off. The problem is that Trump appears to have written off the loss twice.

and Biden’s increasing rift with Netanyahu

Israel has begun attacking Rafah and is showing intentions to launch a full-scale invasion of the one piece of Gaza where civilians have been taking refuge. Wednesday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Congress that the administration was “pausing” shipments of certain weapons to Israel.

Austin said that the US is pausing the shipment of “high-payload munitions” due to Israel’s possible operations in Rafah without a plan for the civilians there.

Friday, a State Department report to Congress gave mixed reviews to Israel’s usage of American weapons so far.

The US says it is “reasonable to assess” that the weapons it has provided to Israel have been used in ways that are “inconsistent” with international human rights law, but that there is not enough concrete evidence to link specific US-supplied weapons to violations or warrant cutting the supply of arms.

Netanyahu continues to have no plan for governing Gaza after the killing stops. This is not just a political problem, it has turned into a military problem as Hamas reinfiltrates areas that had already been cleared.

Criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has increased within the IDF and includes Defense Minister Yoav Gallant who want to know who will replace Hamas. procrastination, they say, has given the terror group space to regroup and force the IDF back into Gaza in larger numbers.

Netanyahu has argued that deciding on a new political manager for Gaza must wait until the war is over, but the IDF and Gallant have countered that during the last few months in which the military have had operational control of nearly all of Gaza avoiding a decision was a missed opportunity.

In my opinion, it is Biden and not Netanyahu who is truly looking out for Israel’s best interests. Netanyahu appears to me to think of Hamas as a leadership structure commanding some number of fighters; capture or kill all those people, and the problem is solved. But I think it’s more accurate to think of Hamas as an idea: Peace with Israel is impossible.

If at the end of this campaign Palestinians are convinced more than ever that peace with Israel is impossible, Hamas will reform — no matter how many of its current members Israel kills.

Meanwhile, the current war erodes the possibility of finding Arab partners to administer Gaza after the war ends. Yesterday, Egypt announced that it would support South Africa’s genocide charges against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

Pro-Palestine voters who are thinking of not supporting Democrats in the fall need to consider what Republicans will do if they get into power. Here, Lindsey Graham defends how Israel is prosecuting the war in Gaza by invoking the US nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

That was the right decision. Give Israel the bombs they need to end the war they can’t afford to lose.

When violent counter-protesters broke up the pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA, the obvious people to suspect were pro-Israel students. But that appears not to be true.

researchers studying hate and anti-government groups have confirmed the presence at the counter-demonstrations of several far-right activists who have been involved in anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-vaccine protests across southern California over the past three years.

This is in line with previous reporting that anti-Muslim and antisemitic online trolls are often the same people. Spreading hate is the point. Any target of opportunity will do.

and the New York Times

I’ve seen a certain amount of debate in opinion columns about whether the NYT slants left or right. The answer, from my view, is complicated, because I think different things are happening at different levels.

You can’t really understand left/right journalistic bias without this observation: Most MAGA positions rely on believing (or at least arguing) things that simply aren’t true: an immigrant crime wave is sweeping through America’s cities, crime in general is up, climate change isn’t real, the Covid vaccine did more harm than good, the economy is terrible, Trump really won the 2020 election (which entails its own full basket of untruths: undocumented immigrants voted, dead people voted, voting machines were rigged …), healthy fetuses get aborted up to (and even past) the moment of birth, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is justified, the Southern border is “open“, January 6 was a peaceful protest led by patriots, the Black Lives Matter protests burned American cities to the ground, and so on. (I’m sure I missed a few.)

At the reporter level, the NYT remains committed to accuracy, so to that extent it has a liberal bias. On any given day, a MAGA true believer who scans the front page of the Times will almost certainly find something to offend his beliefs about the world.

Similarly, NYT columnists are more likely to lean left than right, and conservative NYT columnists are likely to by anti-Trump. (Of course, yesterday they published a guest essay headlined “Biden is Doing it All Wrong.”) I have little doubt that as the November election approaches, the Times will officially endorse Biden.

But at the level where decisions about what to cover get made, the Times has been showing a decidedly conservative bias. Here’s some data gathered by the CSS Lab at the Annenberg School for Communication.

During the week that [Special Counsel Hur’s] report [on Biden’s retention of classified documents] came out, we examined the top 20 articles on the Times’ landing page every four hours. In that time, they published 26 unique articles about Biden’s age, of which 1 of them explored the possibility that Trump’s age was of equal or more concern. This seems like a lot of articles in a short amount of time, but it’s hard to say whether or not it is excessive without some other equally relevant issue to compare it with. Helpfully, an obvious comparison arose when, on February 10, 2024, Trump announced that if he regained power he would pull the US out of NATO and even encourage Russian invasions of democratic allies if their financial commitments were not to his liking. This announcement that Trump would upend the world’s core military alignment of the last 75+ years, garnered 10 unique articles in the timeframe.

Less quantitatively, I’ve been noticing slanted coverage of Trump/Biden polls. Polls that show Trump leading are highlighted, and sometimes garner multiple articles. Polls that show Biden leading get much less coverage. (Again, the polls themselves are reported accurately; reporters seem to be honest and objective.) Among the polls included in 538’s polling average so far in May, Biden leads in four, Trump in two, and they are tied in one. Would you have guessed that from reading the Times?

In general, if the Right wants the public to pay attention to some issue, that issue will get extensive coverage in the Times. It won’t always be covered in the (false) way the Right wants it covered, but the Times will draw its readers’ attention in that direction.

I have no inside knowledge about the NYT. But from the outside it looks like pro-Trump bias at higher levels competes with commitment to accuracy at lower levels.

and you also might be interested in …

Wednesday, the House voted 359-43 to table Marjorie Taylor Greene’s motion to oust Speaker Mike Johnson. Democrats joined Republicans to avoid yet another protracted leadership battle. It’s not clear what Greene thought she would gain by presenting this motion, which protests all the times in recent months Johnson has allowed bipartisan majorities to pass legislation.

“This is the ‘uni-party’ for the American people watching,” Greene said, as if the two parties working together for common goals constituted some kind of betrayal.

A couple of what-Trump-would-do things that have come in recently: He says he’d deport pro-Palestinian protesters and eliminate protections for transgender students.

Not so long ago, “Will you accept the election results even if your side loses?” wasn’t considered a gotcha question. But today’s MAGA Republicans seem to think it is. Watch Tim Scott squirm around answering it. When the interviewer tries to insist, Scott accuses her of bias: “This is why so many Americans believe that NBC is an extension of the Democrat Party.”

What Scott is indirectly pointing to is the main difference between the parties: Democrats remain committed to democracy even when they lose, but Republicans don’t.

Steve Bannon’s conviction for contempt of Congress was upheld by a federal appeals court. Former US attorney Joyce Vance comments:

Bannon is effectively out of appeals. He can delay a little bit longer, asking for the full court to review the decision en banc & asking SCOTUS to hear his case on cert, but neither one of those things will happen. Bannon is going to prison.

Remember how horrible it was when Biden said “Mexico” instead of “Egypt”? Well, Saturday Trump said “Beijing” when he seems to have meant “Taiwan”. And I have no idea what his tribute to “the late, great Hannibal Lecter” was about.

More serious than replacing one word with another, Trump increasingly utters noises that aren’t words at all, like “carrydoubtitebyrite” and “bordeninriviv“. We all call something by the wrong name occasionally, but I know I’ve never heard my verbal centers glitch like that. Something is wrong.

I was glad to see Brian Broome answer Jerry Seinfeld’s old-man complaint that America has lost its sense of humor due to “the extreme left and PC crap”.

I remember my Mom telling me that nobody was funny any more, not like Bob Hope or Red Skelton or the comedians she remembered. This was during the prime of people like Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, and Robin Williams, who I found hilarious.

I remember many of Mom’s favorite comedians. They made fun of drunks and mothers-in-law and so forth. At some point that stopped being funny, because comedy is always changing. If Seinfeld’s routines have stopped being funny, that’s on him, not “the extreme left”.

and let’s close with something colorful

A cloudy evening caused me to miss this weekend’s spectacular display of the northern lights across much of the world. This photo comes from Brunswick, Maine.

Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (2)

What Trump Would Do

May 13, 2024 – 9:30 am

Time badgered Trump into answering its questions, producing some very disturbing quotes.

For some while now there have been reasons to worry about a Trump second term moving America towards authoritarianism: mostly how his first administration ended and the plans various Trump-aligned policy groups have put forward.

Until recently, though, Trump himself had said little to directly validate those worries, beyond occasional threats to “go after” the people he thinks have done him wrong. Mostly that’s because he’s been preoccupied with other topics: complaining about how persecuted he is, lying about Joe Biden and the Biden administration, painting a false rosy picture of how wonderful things were four years ago, and claiming that none of the world’s current problems would exist if he were still president. For the most part, that last point short-circuits any attempt to talk about his future policies: Why should he have to tell us how he would handle Ukraine or Gaza when those problems wouldn’t exist if he were president?

That changed with the publication of Time magazine’s Trump interview and the summary article based on it.

How to interview Trump. Interviewing Donald Trump presents unique challenges, because he won’t simply answer questions. To Trump, a question is an invitation to go on a long ramble which may or may not have anything to do with what he was asked. Along the way he will launch attacks, invent stories, exaggerate, make false insinuations, and sometimes lie outright.

In a live TV interview, this is a journalistic disaster. If you ignore all his false claims, you’re letting him use your platform to spread misinformation to your viewers. But if you challenge him, which false statement do you pick, understanding that you’ll probably never get back to all the others? Meanwhile, he hasn’t answered your question.

Time’s National Politics Reporter Eric Cortellessa took advantage of the print-media format to implement a unique strategy: He let Trump ramble, fact-checked in a separate article, kept returning to his questions, and then wrote a summary article focused on the answers to his questions. If you don’t read the transcript of the interview, you never see all the misinformation.

For example, the interview starts like this:

Let’s start with Day One: January 20, 2025. You have said that you will take a suite of aggressive actions on the border and on immigration—

Donald Trump: Yes.

You have vowed to—

Trump: And on energy. 

Yes, yes. And we’ll come to that, certainly. You have vowed to launch the largest deportation operation in American history. Your advisors say that includes—

Trump: Because we have no choice. I don’t believe this is sustainable for a country, what’s happening to us, with probably 15 million and maybe as many as 20 million by the time Biden’s out. Twenty million people, many of them from jails, many of them from prisons, many of them from mental institutions. I mean, you see what’s going on in Venezuela and other countries. They’re becoming a lot safer.

Well, let’s just talk—so you have said you’re gonna do this massive deportation operation. I want to know specifically how you plan to do that.

Trump: So if you look back into the 1950s, Dwight Eisenhower, he’s not known for that, you know, you don’t think of him that way. Because you see, Ike, but Dwight Eisenhower was very big on illegal immigration not coming into our country. And he did a massive deportation of people. He was doing it for a long time. He got very proficient at it. He was bringing them just to the other side of the border. And they would be back in the country within a matter of days. And then he started bringing them 3,000 miles away—

What’s your plan, sir? 

But what shows up in the summary article is just the eventual answer:

To carry out a deportation operation designed to remove more than 11 million people from the country, Trump told me, he would be willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military, both at the border and inland.

That answer, if you read the transcript, comes wrapped in a lot of fantasies: Trump doesn’t think the camps will be necessary, because the deportation operation will function smoothly and get people out quickly. He expects local police to do most of the work, because so many migrants are criminals that police “know by name”. (The statistics showing that there is no migrant crime wave are “fake news”.) The Posse Comitatus Act (which sharply limits the use of the US military inside the country) won’t constrain him because “these aren’t civilians. … This is an invasion of our country.”

If you accept all of Trump’s fantasies, he seems to be saying that Cortellessa is worrying about nothing: no detention camps, no military involvement, no long delays as courts decide the constitutionality of his plans. He’ll just collect the 15-20 million people he thinks are in the country illegally and ship them out (to somewhere) without incident.

So from the MAGA point of view, this is a hostile interview that results in a slanted article. But my own point of view is similar to Cortellessa’s: Trump’s plans often don’t go smoothly, and when they get blocked, he doesn’t calmly accept defeat. Take, for example, his Mexican wall: When Congress wouldn’t fund it, he shut down the government. And when that didn’t work, he declared a state of emergency that allowed him to take money from the defense budget. How far he’s willing to go when things don’t work out is a question well worth asking.

The answers. Contellessa’s summary of his interview continues:

He would let red states monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans. He would, at his personal discretion, withhold funds appropriated by Congress, according to top advisers. He would be willing to fire a U.S. Attorney who doesn’t carry out his order to prosecute someone, breaking with a tradition of independent law enforcement that dates from America’s founding. He is weighing pardons for every one of his supporters accused of attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, more than 800 of whom have pleaded guilty or been convicted by a jury. He might not come to the aid of an attacked ally in Europe or Asia if he felt that country wasn’t paying enough for its own defense. He would gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.

Each one of those sentences is the result of a back-and-forth similar to the one about migrant detention camps. Trump was especially cagey about abortion, saying that it wasn’t a federal matter any more, now that the Supreme Court has moved it to the states. He refused to discuss the possibility of vetoing a federal abortion ban, saying that it wouldn’t happen because it would need 60 votes to pass the Senate. (Contellessa doesn’t raise the possibility that a Republican Senate majority might do away with the filibuster precisely so that it could ban abortion.)

Contellessa then focused in on whether there was anything states couldn’t do, and Trump’s reluctant answer was no. Monitor women’s pregnancies to make sure they weren’t getting abortions? “I think they might do that. Again, you’ll have to speak to the individual states.” He dodged an issue he will have to address: how the federal government regulates the abortion drug mifepristone. He said he would have a statement out about that in the next week, but in the follow-up two weeks later that statement hadn’t appeared. (It still hasn’t.) And he refused to say how he planned to vote on Florida’s upcoming referendum about its six-week abortion ban.

His comment on being a dictator only on his first day? A joke. (Nobody has a sense of humor any more.) And Trump denied that he would seek to change the two-term limit. “I wouldn’t be in favor of it at all. I intend to serve four years and do a great job.”

He sees “a definite anti-white feeling in this country” that is “very unfair”.

Transactional government. Something Contellessa didn’t cover is Trump’s very wide-open notion of transactional government. Thursday (after the Time interview) the WaPo published an article about his meeting with oil executives at Mar-a-Lago.

As Donald Trump sat with some of the country’s top oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago Club last month, one executive complained about how they continued to face burdensome environmental regulations despite spending $400 million to lobby the Biden administration in the last year.

Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room overlooking the ocean: You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted, according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.

Giving $1 billion would be a “deal,” Trump said, because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him

This is far from the only example. In March, Trump abruptly reversed himself on banning TikTok. The change happened shortly after a meeting with Jeff Yass, a Trump donor who owns billions in TikTok-related stock. During his first administration, Amazon lost a valuable defense contract because Trump thought Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post wasn’t covering him favorably enough.

Summing up. It’s easy to take these issues one-by-one and feel like they wouldn’t be that big a deal. He’ll tell the Justice Department who to prosecute. He’ll deport at least 11 million people, some of whom have been in the country for decades. Ukraine may fall, leaving NATO countries to wonder whether the US will support them against Russia. He’ll establish that committing violence in his name is OK; you can count on a pardon. The civil service will lose its independence, making the federal government one big political machine. He’ll use emergency powers to circumvent Congress’ power of the purse. Companies that want a break on regulations just need to do something in return.

Now picture it all happening at once. The America we’re describing is a very different and much darker place than any we have lived in so far.

Posted in Articles | Tagged | Comments (10)

The Monday Morning Teaser

May 13, 2024 – 8:28 am

I’m back from my “vacation”, where I went back to my home town in Illinois to lead a church service about how to watch the news without going crazy. I’ve put the text on my other blog, where you can read it if you want.

The featured post this week focuses on the Time magazine article about Trump’s second term. Almost as interesting as the conclusions their interviewer draws is his strategy for interviewing Trump at all: Eric Contellessa doesn’t challenge anything in Trump’s wild rambles, but keeps coming back to the questions he asked. It’s a print-media tactic that gets around many of the problems of interviewing Trump on TV.

Anyway, that should be out before too long, certainly by 10 EDT.

The weekly summary covers Trump’s Manhattan trial, which mainly consisted of Stormy Daniels this week. Michael Cohen should start testifying today. Also Israel’s attacks on Rafah, the last refuge of Palestinian civilians, and the Biden administration’s increasing conflicts with Netanyahu. I’ve got more to say about The New York Times. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s attempt to oust Speaker Johnson came to nothing. It sure looks like Steve Bannon is going to jail at long last. And I may have missed the northern lights, but lots of people got good pictures of it.

The summary should post around noon or so.

Posted in Morning tease | Comments (10)

Incentives

April 29, 2024 – 12:43 pm

No Sift next week. The next new posts will appear on May 13.

If someone with those kinds of powers, the most powerful person in the world, with the greatest amount of authority, could go into office knowing that there would be no potential penalty for committing crimes, I’m trying to understand what the disincentive is from turning the Oval Office into the seat of criminal activity in this country. … If the potential for criminal liability is taken off the table, wouldn’t there be a significant risk that future presidents would be emboldened to commit crimes with abandon while they’re in office?

– Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson during the discussion of presidential immunity

This week’s featured posts are “The Manhattan case against Trump is stronger than I expected“, “What to make of student protests?“, and “The Supreme Court is breaking America’s faith in the law“.

This week everybody was talking about student protests

This is the subject of a featured post.

After I pushed the button on that piece, I noticed this tweet by GOP opinion-shaper Frank Luntz:

Last night at the [White House Correspondents] dinner, I spoke privately with 4 members of Congress: 2 Dems and 2 GOPers. All 4 are big foreign policy players and all 4 are strongly pro-Israel in every way. However… All 4 spoke with significant and serious concern (bordering on anger) about Israel’s impact on humanitarian aid in Gaza. None of them called for a ceasefire, but all of them were deeply critical of what they believe is Israel’s interference and lack of cooperation in getting aid to the Palestinian people. For more than a decade, some Israeli leaders dismissed what was happening on college campuses. They were wrong then, and they would be wrong now to dismiss this warning about what’s happening in Congress.

and Trump’s trial

This is covered in another featured post. I’ll include here some details that didn’t fit into that article.

The trial has given Trump many things to complain about, from the courtroom being cold to the judge’s gag order that takes away “my constitutional rights to speak“, i.e. fairly ineffectively preventing him from trying to intimidate witnesses and jurors.

His weirdest complaint, though, was that the trial prevented him from being with his wife Melania on her birthday Friday. The court proceedings ended for the day at 4:30, so there was plenty of time for the Trumps to have a night on the town, if only Melania had decided to leave their Florida home and come to their Trump Tower apartment to support her husband during his trial. But clearly it is Judge Merchan’s cruelty and not Melania’s indifference that is keeping them apart.

Another reality-denying Trump complaint is that his supporters are being kept away from the trial. He posted:

Thousands of people were turned away from the Courthouse in Lower Manhattan by steel stanchions and police, literally blocks from the tiny side door from where I enter and leave.

None of that is true. In fact, MAGA supporters have almost unanimously ignored his pleas for them to act out. More than a year ago, Trump predicted “potential death and destruction” if he were charged in this case. Again and again, he has warned that the American people would not stand for any attempt to put him on trial, and has done his best to incite January 6 style violence. But it hasn’t worked. Every day, a mere handful of docile Trump supporters show up outside the courthouse.

and the Supreme Court

People who believe in our legal system generally found Thursday’s discussion of Trump’s “absolute immunity” claim not just annoying or enraging, but depressing. Our highest court is corrupt. There’s just no getting around that any more. I discuss why in the third featured post.

One aside, concerning several cases discussed this week: The arguments underline a basic difference between how liberals and conservatives think: Liberals are more grounded in reality. Again and again, the liberal justices referenced things that are actually happening, while the conservative justices were far more interested in imagining scenarios that could happen, but are highly unlikely.

I’ve made this observation before, with respect to guns.

If you’ve ever wandered into an argument over guns and gun control, you’ve undoubtedly noticed that the two sides talk past each other. Proponents of gun control quote statistics: how many more shooting deaths we have in America than there are in countries with fewer guns, how many more suicides or police deaths there are in well-armed states, and so on.

Pro-gun advocates are more likely to tell stories, and often those stories are dark what-if fantasies: What if home invaders came to kill you, kidnap your baby, or rape your teen-age daughter? What if you were a hostage in a bank robbery? What if you were at a restaurant or grocery store when terrorists broke in and started killing people? Wouldn’t you wish you had a gun then?

Such stories are easily stretched to indict even the mildest forms of gun control, like limiting magazines to ten shots: Picture your wife hiding in a closet with a handgun. Before she hid, she already gotten off a few shots at the invaders, and now she’s not sure how many shots she has left. Don’t you wish now you’d been able to buy her a gun with a larger magazine?

In the featured post on the Court, I described how Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh wanted to discuss just about every possibility other than the one in front of them, where a grand jury has found probable cause to charge Trump with crimes.

Something similar happened in the Court’s discussion of how the federal EMTALA law conflicted with Idaho’s abortion law. Conservative justices wanted to talk about bizarre hypotheticals in which deceitful women could lie about their suicidal impulses in order to get late-term abortions. Liberals wanted to talk about actual cases in which women with problem pregnancies have to wait until they are near death to get care.

You can see it across the board: Men might claim to be women to get into your daughter’s bathroom. Has that ever happened? Well, maybe not, but it could. Librarians could be grooming your children for pedophilia. Can you name one? Transwomen might drive “real” women out of women’s sports. Well, we just saw the NCAA basketball tournament. Is that happening? On and on.

and new indictments in Arizona

This week Arizona indicted a number of people involved in the Trump fake-elector plot, including all the electors themselves, Mark Meadows, Rudy Giuliani, and a few other Trump administration insiders.

and you also might be interested in …

Harvey Weinstein’s rape conviction was overturned by the New York court of appeals, on the grounds that the trial judge allowed the jury to hear too much about crimes that weren’t directly related. The state has the option to try him again, and in the meantime New York can send him to California, where he faces a 16-year sentence.

It’s a tricky point of the law, which comes up again in the current Trump trial: You’re supposed to be on trial for the specific crime in the indictment, and not for being a bad person in general. But if other crimes indicate a pattern of behavior, they might be relevant. So a judge has to decide: How does the illustrative value of a defendant’s previous bad behavior balance against the possibility of prejudicing the jury against him?

Texas Senator Ted Cruz may have thought his arrangement with iHeart Media circumvented both Senate rules banning outside jobs and election laws preventing candidates from coordinating with or directly raising money for their super PACs. But he may have gotten a little too clever.

Here’s the arrangement: Cruz hosts a three-episodes-a-week podcast, which would be a full-time job for a lot of people. He does it “for free” in the sense that he does not get direct payments from iHeart, which carries the podcast and sells advertising on it. However, iHeart does make regular payments to Cruz’ super PAC, which so far have totaled at least $630K and constitute more than a third of the PAC’s total contributions.

It’s undeniable that this violates the intention of the laws regulating super PACs. But it’s possible Cruz has found an unethical loophole in the law. No one can say for sure at the moment, because Cruz and iHeart refuse to reveal the exact terms of their agreement.

One line of the Texas Observer article on this strikes me as hilarious:

Cruz claims he does the podcast as a service to the public by pulling back the curtain on corruption in Washington.

I can’t argue with him there.

BTW, you might wonder how Cruz’ podcast differs from a Substack blog I often quote: Quick Update by Rep. Jeff Jackson (D-NC). The difference is that Jackson’s blog generates no revenue: subscriptions are free and there are no ads.

President Biden at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner:

The 2024 election is in full swing, and yes, age is an issue. I’m a grown man running against a six-year-old.

I don’t know what to make of South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem’s account of killing her 14-month-old dog Cricket. She tells the story in her new book No Going Back, which isn’t out yet. The Guardian, which got an advance copy, summarizes:

She includes her story about the ill-fated Cricket, she says, to illustrate her willingness, in politics as well as in South Dakota life, to do anything “difficult, messy and ugly” if it simply needs to be done.

Maybe this is where the Republican Party is these days. In 2022, many GOP candidates carried or shot guns in their ads. So maybe the next step is to show you’re not afraid to kill. Or maybe Noem is sending a message specifically to Trump, who is said to be considering her as a possible VP candidate: Mike Pence wasn’t willing to betray the Republic for you, but I’ll do whatever ugly things need doing. (And Trump famously hates dogs.)

and let’s close with something ominous

I suspect I’m not the only one who sees himself Tom Gauld’s “To Be Read” cartoon.

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The Supreme Court is breaking America’s faith in the law

April 29, 2024 – 11:47 am

It’s no longer possible to explain the justices’ behavior
without accounting for partisan politics and corruption.

Hacks? Back in 2021 at the University of Louisville, Justice Amy Comey Barrett addressed criticism of the Court she had joined less than a year before:

“My goal today is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks,” the conservative Barrett said, according to the Louisville Courier Journal. She said the high court is defined by “judicial philosophies” instead of personal political views. “Judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties,” Barrett said.

Most of the legal experts who have appeared on MSNBC or CNN since then have more-or-less given that view the benefit of the doubt. Sure, some things have been hard to explain. In particular, the Court’s “originalist” rulings — “originalism” being one of the philosophies Barrett cited — have been suspiciously selective about the “history” that informed their majority opinions, and overall the originalist justices have shown little interest in history as it is taught by professional historians. On its shadow docket, the Court was far more responsive to the Trump administration’s requests to move quickly than it has been to the Biden administration. And then there’s Clarence Thomas, who takes six-figure gifts from billionaire “friends” he had never met before he ascended to the Court.

But hackery? No. Surely not. This is the Supreme Court we’re talking about.

These talking-head legal experts are almost entirely institutionalists: ex-prosecutors, retired judges, law professors, and even one ex-Acting-Solicitor-General. They’re deeply invested in the idea that the legal system works.

They’ve had a tough week.

Thursday, the Court heard oral arguments on Donald Trump’s claim that he has “absolute immunity” for anything he did as president. That claim is holding up his federal prosecution in the January 6 case.

Partisan delay. It’s already been clear that the Court has been shading the process in Trump’s favor. The original purpose of this immunity claim was to delay Trump’s trial past the election, so that he can order the Justice Department to dismiss the case if he becomes president again. Both the district court and the appellate court found no legal merit in “absolute immunity” — or in any kind of immunity that would cover this case — and the Supreme Court didn’t have to hear the appeal at all.

But instead, the Court has dragged its feet. Back in December, Jack Smith asked the Court to hear the appeal immediately, skipping the appeals court, so that Trump’s trial could get under way. They refused, waited for the appellate ruling, and then spent weeks deciding whether to review that ruling. When they finally did decide to hear the case, they scheduled oral arguments on the last day of the term for hearing arguments, burning as much time as possible.

But still, the institutionalist commentators told us, while the conservative majority might manipulate the calendar in a partisan fashion, it wouldn’t distort the law to favor Trump. Surely it would find, as both lower courts did, that there was no legal merit in this claim.

After Thursday’s hearing, though, that outcome is seriously in doubt. The conservative justices gave Trump’s attorney a far more sympathetic hearing than he deserved.

Breaking faith. Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick expressed a disillusionment I heard from many professional commentators:

As a blinkered institutionalist, I’m getting blowback along the lines of: “I told you so. They’re a bunch of partisan hacks.” I truly believed that at least seven members of the court would take the potential failure of democracy as a proposition seriously enough that the partisan valence of this case went away. That didn’t happen.

Former Assistant US Attorney Andrew Weissmann said, “Big picture: I’m in a very, very depressed mode.” And his podcasting cohost Mary McCord (a former Assistant Attorney General) replied “It’s been a rough several weeks of listening to Supreme Court arguments.”

Weissmann characterized the justices’ discussion of presidential immunity as “almost like a policy debate in Congress”. (It’s worth listening to this part, because you can hear the heartbreak in his voice.)

What was missing from that [discussion] was the text of the Constitution, the intent of the Framers, the history of the United States. I mean, it so belied the originalism/textualism credo of the so-called conservative justices. … And then, even within that policy debate, what was missing from the conservative justices was any record support, in terms of 200 years of history. …

It was remarkable to me the antipathy towards the actual criminal justice system that you were hearing from Alito and Gorsuch. Which was Alito saying, “You know, you can indict a ham sandwich.” I mean, this is our criminal justice system! … It was remarkable to me that you had people sitting in the Supreme Court denigrating the entire infrastructure of and edifice of our criminal justice system that they are a huge part of creating.

Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern summarized this same discussion with equal amazement and horror:

Alito had [Michael] Dreeben [representing the special prosecutor’s office] walk through the layers that protect a president from a frivolous or vindictive prosecution. Then he dismissed each one out of hand. So Dreeben said: First, you need a prosecutor who’s willing to bring charges; then you need a grand jury to indict; then there’s a criminal proceeding in open court where a jury of his peers decides whether he’s been proved guilty. And Alito just laughs it off as though it’s a big joke. Because we all know Justice Department attorneys are hacks who’ll do whatever they want, right? And a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich—nobody believes a grand jury will do anything worthwhile. And then, oh, sure a jury of his peers, like that’s going to do anything. [1]

This is the justice who is, by far, the most friendly to prosecutors and hostile to criminal defendants in case after case. Who could not for the life of him find a violation of the right to trial by jury or due process. But when the defendant is Trump, he suddenly thinks this entire system of criminal prosecution is such a bad joke that the Supreme Court has to step in and essentially quash this prosecution, because we can’t trust the system to work. The system that is incarcerating so many other people whose convictions Sam Alito just rubber-stamps.

And Lithwick replied:

I felt like that was the turn for me—it was Alito winking to Dreeben, saying, in short, “We both worked in the Justice Department; we know what a racket that crap is.” This was another one of those moments when I thought, sorry: Did one of the justices of the United States Supreme Court just imply that everything that happens at the Justice Department is hackery and rigged prosecutions? …

For his part, bribe-taking Clarence Thomas said little, but his very presence in the room said much: His wife Ginny traded texts with Mark Meadows in the lead-up to January 6. She probably won’t be called as a witness, but she could be. Under any sane system of ethics, he should have recused himself from this case.

But this is Clarence Thomas. He has no ethics. And this is the Supreme Court, where ethical standards have no enforcement mechanism. So there he sat. He will presumably vote on this case and perhaps even write a self-serving opinion.

Restraint? Another longstanding principle of conservative jurisprudence is judicial restraint: A court should decide the case brought before it, and not make wide-ranging rulings that are not needed to decide that case.

But Thursday, the conservative justices could not be bothered to discuss the actual case — Trump’s attempt to stay in office despite losing the 2020 election. Kavanaugh said as much: “I’m not as concerned about the here and now, I’m more concerned about the future.” Gorsuch echoed: “I’m not concerned about this case, but I am concerned about future uses of the criminal law to target political opponents based on accusations about their motives.” And Alito added: “I want to talk about this in the abstract.”

These justices seemed to take for granted that this case is precisely the kind of vindictive prosecution Trump’s lawyers warned about, and to discount entirely that a president might abuse his power to stay in office illegally, as a grand jury has indicted Trump for doing. These prior assumptions are entirely political assessments of the situation. They cited no facts of the case that would point in this direction, and no legal problems with the indictment.

What happens next? What seems likely to come out of these arguments is a ruling — probably on the very last day of the term in June, continuing to burn as much time as possible — that attempts to define a doctrine that is not really needed in this case, and has not been needed in the two centuries of American history so far: drawing a line between presidential acts that are immune from subsequent prosecution and those that are not. Having drawn this line, the Court can remand the case to Judge Chutkan with instructions to apply the new doctrine. Her ruling, whatever it is, can then be appealed back up the ladder, pushing the trial well past the election.

Fly free, Mr. Trump!

Jay Kuo, however, finds hope in an ironic place: Amy Coney Barrett. Barrett, Kuo reports, actually seemed to be paying attention to the case at hand, and might be looking for a way for the legal system to do its job, rather than grind its gears until the case is moot. So perhaps it will fall to her to fashion a way around the partisan hacks whose existence she denied in 2021.

As I remarked in my piece yesterday, so much of our future, and indeed even the plight of the world, has depended on just one or a few traditional conservatives still managing to do the right, principled thing. It might happen again here, who knows?

Barrett was interested in drawing a line between a president’s private acts and his officials acts.

Okay. So, in the Special Counsel’s brief, on pages 46 and 47, he urges us, even if we assume that there’s—even if we were to decide or assume that there was some sort of immunity for official acts, that there was sufficient private acts in the indictment for the trial to go, for the case to go back and the trial to begin immediately.

Barrett outlined scenarios that included much of Trump’s indicted conduct, such as the conspiracy to present false electors to Congress. Kuo speculates that Barrett might convince Roberts and the three liberal justices to support a majority opinion along these lines.

Another possible way forward consists of Judge Chutkan taking the remand and getting creative with it. In deciding which of Trump’s acts might fit the Court’s brand-new definition of immunity, she might have to hold an evidentiary hearing — not a trial — in which much of the prosecution’s case could be presented. It would not result in a jury verdict, but at least testimony from witnesses like Mike Pence and Mark Meadows could get onto the record.

This is decidedly a second-best (or third- or fourth-best) result. In a nation with an uncorrupted Court, a full trial would be completed and a jury verdict reached before the election. But we don’t live in such a nation. At least until Democrats can win enough elections to rebalance the Court — hopefully naming honest jurists with liberal philosophies rather than just more partisan hacks who lean left rather than right — we’re stuck with the corrupt Court we have.

[1] It’s worth pointing out that juries were the difference between the legitimate performance of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the politically motivated Barr-Trump special counselship of John Durham. Mueller obtained convictions of a number of Trump associates like Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. But Durham’s drawn-out expensive investigation resulted in only two jury verdicts, both unanimous acquittals.

Juries are in fact what Trump is afraid of in his current cases. If his indictments were indeed the political witch hunts he claims, he should want a jury to expose this fraud to the voters. Instead, he seeks every delay possible, so that if a jury rules at all, it will come to late to inform the electorate.

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What to make of student protests?

April 29, 2024 – 9:43 am

Dangerous antisemitism or peaceful protest against genocide?
You can find whatever story you want to read.

Protests against Israel’s US-backed war in Gaza have broken out on college campuses around the country, with a wide variety of responses from campus officials and police. Some of the tent encampments are being left alone, while on other campuses the demonstrators are being forcibly removed.

Similarly, press coverage has been all over the map. Some sources essentially repeat the Netanyahu claim that “antisemitic mobs have taken over the leading universities”, while others interview demonstrators with more sympathy.

Even the coverage from supposedly liberal sources has been mixed. I was listening to MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Wednesday when host Joe Scarborough cited the fact that students had not protested the mass killing of Arabs by Saddam in Iraq or Assad in Syria, clearly implying that Israel is being viewed differently because of antisemitism. I couldn’t decide whether Scarborough was being clueless or actively disingenuous: The obvious difference is that Israel is carrying out its operations with American funds, American weapons, and American support at the UN. Whether we see Israel’s Gaza war as just or unjust, Americans should view these Palestinian deaths differently because we are implicated in them.

Given this diverse press coverage, I should probably go visit an encampment and make my own judgment, but I haven’t. The conclusion I’ve come to from reading a variety of sources is that, as is true with any large group of people, you can find whatever you look for. If you look for antisemitism, you can find it, like the Columbia student who said “Zionists do not deserve to live.” He has been banned from campus.

The large majority of demonstrators, though, look to me to be exactly what they say they are: peaceful protesters who think the killing in Gaza is unjust, want it to stop, and want the US (and their universities) to stop supporting it.

Vox reports:

Student protests on Columbia’s campus have been nonviolent so far. Representatives from the New York Police Department said during a press conference Monday that there had been some incidents in which Israeli flags were snatched from students and unspecified hateful things said. But they said that there have not been any reports of Columbia students being physically harmed or any credible threats made against individuals or groups associated with the university community ahead of the start of the Jewish holiday of Passover.

… On Tuesday, a student draped in an Israeli flag spoke to reporters from within the fenced-in area of the encampment. Jewish students who have been suspended from Columbia and Barnard stated that they had celebrated a Passover Seder within the encampment at a press conference.

I agree with Robert Reich:

Antisemitism should have no place in America — not on college campuses or anywhere else. 

But there is nothing inherently antisemitic about condemning the ongoing bloodshed in Gaza that has so far killed at least 34,000 people, mostly women and children.

Protesting this slaughter is not hate speech. It is what should be done on a college campus — taking a stand against a perceived wrong, at least provoking discussion and debate.

In the end, you may decide that Israel’s actions in Gaza are entirely justified, given the horror of Hamas’ October 7 attacks and the likelihood of similar attacks in the future. (Or you might not.) But reasonable people can disagree about this, and they should be allowed to express their views in public.

Many Republican politicians have responded cynically to the protests, trying to recreate Ronald Reagan’s successful demonization of campus protests during the Vietnam War. For example, it’s hard to take Texas Governor Greg Abbott seriously when he talks like this:

These protesters belong in jail. Antisemitism will not be tolerated in Texas. Period.

But Abbott is only intolerant of apparent left-wing antisemitism; he’s always been fine with right-wing antisemitism. Reporter Steven Monacelli of the Texas Observer comments:

I’ve seen no credible reporting of actual antisemitic incidents at the UT Austin protest. What I can tell you is that I’ve reported on numerous neo-Nazi events and Greg Abbott never once tried to put any of them in jail.

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The Manhattan case against Trump is stronger than I expected

April 29, 2024 – 9:11 am

I had doubts about this indictment. But they’re being answered.

The New York state trial of Donald Trump for 34 felony counts of falsifying business records has now completed its first full week of testimony. There’s still a lot to come, but already the case appears much stronger than I had expected.

Before the trial started, I (and a lot of other people) thought prosecutors faced two big potential problems:

  • Their case depends on the jury believing Michael Cohen, who is a convicted perjurer.
  • Falsifying business records is only a felony if the false records were intended to support or cover up some other crime. Establishing that other crime might be difficult.

Well, I shouldn’t have worried. By the time Cohen takes the stand, he’ll just be coloring in a picture that has already been outlined by other evidence. Documents and more trustworthy witnesses will establish that meetings were held, topics were discussed, agreements were made, and money was paid. Very little of the case relies on believing things purely on Cohen’s say-so.

As for the other crime, at least one is already well on its way to being established. National Enquirer publisher David Pecker has told the jury that the catch-and-kill scheme that kept several bad-for-Trump stories out of publication was intended to influence the 2016 election, and that he knew at the time their agreement violated campaign finance laws.

Simultaneously, the defense looks weak. Trump’s apparent strategy is to challenge the prosecution’s points piecemeal, but his lawyers are offering no alternate narrative that pulls everything together. So it’s already easy to picture what will happen when the jury deliberates: Some juror will repeat the defense’s challenge to some detail in the prosecution’s case, and another juror will respond, “Maybe. But then why did this other thing happen?” If there was no agreement with Trump, why did The National Enquirer suppress stories that would have sold a lot of papers? If Trump didn’t order it, why did Michael Cohen borrow money to pay Stormy Daniels? (And what about that document where Allen Weisselberg added up all the numbers to arrive at Cohen’s reimbursement?) If there was no crime, then what did Cohen go to jail for? And so on.

To the extent that it tells a story at all, the defense is claiming that Trump did nothing wrong, while all around him other people were doing odd things they had no reason to do. Believing that is not impossible, I suppose, but it requires something well beyond reasonable doubt of the evidence presented. [1]

This scattershot approach is a tactic Trump uses in all his scandals: He never settles on a single explanation of what happened, leaving himself free to spin different stories at different times to different audiences: I didn’t do it. I did it, but it’s not illegal. Maybe it’s not legal, but everybody does it and gets away with it, so singling me out is political persecution. Biden, Hillary, Obama, or somebody else I don’t like has done worse. In fact, it was the right thing to do and I’m proud I did it; nobody else would have had the guts to do it.

That works in a political world of short news cycles and shifting attention spans, but in court it fails. (We’ve already seen it fail in his civil trials.) The jury is required to sit there for weeks and keep paying attention, so distracting them for a moment or two doesn’t get him off the hook. They get to see all the evidence, and they want to form a complete picture of what happened. So if one side can paint them a complete picture and the other side can’t, they notice.

[1] One thing I remember from my own jury experience was the judge’s explanation of “reasonable doubt”, which is literally doubt that has some rationality behind it. Just being able to imagine that the defendant might not be guilty is not good enough. That’s why evil-twin theories don’t usually fly in court.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

April 29, 2024 – 8:49 am

It’s another multiple-featured-post week, as attempts at short notes repeatedly got out of hand. Fortunately, all three featured posts will be relatively short.

The subjects are obvious: the student protests, Trump’s Manhattan trial, and the depressing Supreme Court discussion of Trump’s immunity claim.

The main thing I learned from the Manhattan trial so far is captured in the post’s title: “The Manhattan case against Trump is stronger than I expected”. In particular, two aspects of the case I expected to be problems are looking pretty solid: The jury isn’t going to be asked to trust Michael Cohen’s word for much of anything, and connecting Trump’s fraudulent business documents to another crime shouldn’t be that hard. That post should be out shortly.

Next, the student protests. I realized I had to write about this because the mainstream coverage has been all over the map. Is it true (as Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu claims) that “antisemitic mobs have taken over the leading universities”, or are the pro-Palestinian encampments made up of peaceful students who just want the killing to stop? That post should appear by 10 EDT.

Finally, Thursday’s arguments before the Supreme Court were deeply disillusioning to the liberal legal experts on cable news networks. Most of them are institutionalists, and had been strongly committed to the idea that the Court’s recent behavior has been due to a difference in philosophies, rather than partisanship and corruption. That view was really hard to square with what we heard Thursday, particularly from Justice Alito. A lot of crow has been eaten on CNN and MSNBC these last few days, as people who have devoted their lives to the US justice system have had to admit that, no, the Supreme Court really is a bunch of partisan hacks. I’ll try to get that out by 11.

After diverting all those stories to separate posts, the weekly summary should be short. There are new 2020-election indictments in Arizona. Harvey Weinstein’s rape conviction was overturned, but he won’t be going free anytime soon. There’s that bizarre story about Governor Noem and the dog. A few tidbits related to the Trump trials didn’t fit into the featured posts. And I’ll find a few other things. Hopefully that appears by noon.

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Trustworthiness

April 22, 2024 – 11:19 am

I wouldn’t believe Donald Trump if his tongue were notarized.

– potential juror not seated for Trump trial

This week’s featured post is “Defending American Values: Trial by Jury“.

This week everybody was talking about the dysfunction of the House GOP

I guess all’s well that ends well. Saturday, pro-Russia House Republicans were finally overcome and the Ukraine aid President Biden requested last September was approved. The aid passed with Democrats voting 210-0 in favor and Republicans 101-112 against.

The road to that vote was very strange. Typically, passing a bill begins with passing a set of rules for the vote. The rules resolution defines the process for passing the bill, including the timing of the vote and what amendments will be in order. This is done through the Rules Committee, which typically is a rubber-stamp for the Speaker, whose party has a majority on that committee. Rules Committee votes are often party-line.

This time, though three Republicans voted against the rule, which only got out of the committee because Democrats supported it. Similarly on the floor of the House, 55 Republicans voted against the rule, which would have failed without Democratic support.

The Senate is expected to pass the Ukraine aid package tomorrow, and the weaponry (some of which is already stockpiled in Europe), should start arriving within days.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, who Colorado Republican Rep. Ken Buck accused of “mouthing Russian propaganda“, reiterated her threat to oust Johnson (in the same manner Kevin McCarthy was removed in October after refusing to shut down the government), but did not bring her vacate-the-chair resolution to the floor before the House adjourned.

That could mean that she knows she doesn’t have the votes, but it’s hard to say for sure.

This whole episode points out the dysfunction of the House’s right wing. They managed to delay Ukraine aid, but not stop it. And they got nothing in exchange for letting it pass.

In February, Senator Lankford (R-OK) had negotiated a Ukraine-aid package that included very much of what the GOP wanted in a border bill. But Trump decided he wanted the border as an issue in November, so he torpedoed that compromise.

So now Republicans get to complain that we are spending money to secure Ukraine but not to secure our southern border, but it’s empty rhetoric. Democrats were willing to take action on the border, but Republicans weren’t.

One of the most ridiculous stories of the week was the Freedom Caucus worrying that Speaker Johnson was going to launch a surprise attack on them.

Conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus are signing up to take shifts to monitor the chamber floor in order to prevent their own party leaders from making unilateral moves that could curb their power.

This group called itself the Floor Action Response Team, a.k.a. FART. You can’t make this stuff up.

and Trump’s trial

Last week I was hearing that it might take as long as a month to find a jury for Trump’s Manhattan trial, which began last Monday. In fact, 12 jurors and six alternates were in place by Friday. Opening statements are happening this morning.

The most unsettling story of the week (other than the disturbed man who set himself on fire to send a message that no one has been able to decipher) was MAGA-world’s attempt to rig and intimidate the jury. In the featured post, I take a step back and consider Trumpists’ attacks on the jury system as part of their larger authoritarian project.

Trump has quite obviously been defying Judge Merchan’s gag order. The judge will hold a hearing tomorrow. What he decides to do should tell us a lot about how the trial will proceed.

It’s obvious that Trump believes he can’t be jailed, and that any fines will just be the cost of doing business. I’ll be curious to see how Merchan punctures that confidence. I hope he has had somebody working on the logistical problem of jailing a man with Secret Service protection. A good first step would be to send Trump on a tour of the facilities Merchan has picked out.

Trump is having trouble accepting the fact that he has been indicted by a grand jury of American citizens, and so is a criminal defendant.

Case in point: Barron Trump’s high school graduation. Trump asked Judge Merchan to adjourn the trial for a day on May 17 so that he can go to the ceremony. Merchan said maybe; if the trial is on schedule then, an adjournment might happen. Trump took this as a rejection and complained bitterly on social media, inciting his followers to denounce the judge. (Michael Cohen then posted that Trump had never attended his other children’s graduations, which seems not to be true.)

But the upshot is that Trump is being treated like what he is: a criminal defendant. Defendants don’t typically get to arrange the court schedule for their own convenience. They also don’t get to control the court sketch artist or the room’s thermostat, or to prevent reporters from mentioning that they fall asleep in court.

Merchan is simply using the levers he has to keep Trump under control: If Trump keeps trying to delay the trial any way he can, he won’t get to go to Barron’s graduation. In other words: If you want something from me, behave yourself.

My conclusion: Trump knows he won’t behave, and is already setting up to deny that it will be his own fault when he misses the graduation.

Trump scheduled a rally Saturday in North Carolina, but cancelled it due to weather. It’s got to be wearing on him to go so long without the encouragement of a worshiping crowd.

If there’s one person who’s enjoying all this, it’s Jimmy Kimmel. While he was hosting the Oscars over a month ago, Kimmel read aloud Trump’s social-media rant against Kimmel’s performance, and then addressed Trump directly:

Thank you for watching. I’m surprised you’re still [up]. Isn’t it past your jail time?

Five weeks later, Trump hasn’t been able to let that go, so Wednesday he used his day off from court to post another rant about Kimmel and the Oscars, pretending it was Kimmel who couldn’t get over it.

Stupid Jimmy Kimmel, who still hasn’t recovered from his horrendous performance and big ratings drop as Host of The Academy Awards, especially when he showed he suffered from TDS, commonly known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, to the entire World by reading on air my TRUTH about how bad a job he was doing that night, right before he stumbled through announcing the biggest award of all, ‘Picture of the Year.’

Wednesday night, Kimmel took this apart line by line: Ratings were up, and as the host, Kimmel didn’t present any awards.

The person who presented the [Best Picture] award was Al Pacino, not me. We are different people. … You’d think he would know that because I’m pretty sure ‘Say hello to my little friend’ is what he said to Stormy Daniels that got him in all this trouble.

Kimmel later suggested that if he hosted again next year, Trump might be able to watch “on the TV in the Rec Room at Rikers”. The whole monologue is worth watching, and proves that a politician should never get into a back-and-forth with a comedian.

The phrase “Trump derangement syndrome” is a classic projection, as Kimmel pointed out. (“There’s only one person who suffers from Trump derangement syndrome. His name is Donald Trump.”) The surest way to get yourself diagnosed with TDS is to look at facts about Trump, apply ordinary standards of morality and decency, and reach the obvious conclusion that the man is a piece of shit.

But what’s truly deranged is the way Trump cultists distort reality to justify whatever their idol does. Take sexual assault, for example. At least two dozen women have publicly accused Trump of some form of inappropriate sexual advances, up to and including rape. Their stories are remarkably similar, and they track with the behavior Trump bragged about on the Access Hollywood tape.

The Trump cult explanation is simple: All the women are lying, and Trump’s confession was meaningless “locker room talk”.

Who’s deranged here?

Kevin McCarthy is trying to normalize Trump’s denial of the 2020 election by asking “Has Hillary Clinton ever said she lost the 2016 election?” Yeah, she did. On national TV. There’s video.

and Israel/Iran

Cooler heads may be prevailing. The tit-for-tat between Israel and Iran seems to be dying down and may have ended. After Israel bombed Iran’s diplomatic compound in Damascus, Iran vowed to retaliate. On April 13, it sent over 300 drones and missiles flying towards Israel, nearly all of which got knocked down. Then it was Israel who vowed to retaliate, which it did early Friday morning.

Israel attacked a military base very close to a major Iranian nuclear facility. So the attack was mostly a message: If we had wanted to strike something much more important, you couldn’t have stopped us. So far, Iran seems to be ignoring this attack, at least in public.

So we can hope that this particular episode is over, and Iran will go back to fighting Israel through proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah.

and the Supreme Court

The Court has some interesting cases lined up this week, which is the final week of arguments in this term. Thursday, it will hear arguments on Trump’s claim of criminal immunity. The big question here is not whether it will find in his favor, but whether it will continue playing along with his delay strategy. (I have a fantasy in which the Biden administration files an amicus brief, urging the Court to decide this case quickly so that Biden knows what laws he can break before his term ends. In particular, can he order the assassinations of certain justices while he still has time to nominate replacements?)

Liz Cheney writes:

Mr. Trump believes he can threaten and intimidate judges and their families, assert baseless legal defenses and thereby avoid accountability altogether. Through this conduct, he seeks to break our institutions. If Mr. Trump’s tactics prevent his Jan. 6 trial from proceeding in the ordinary course, he will also have succeeded in concealing critical evidence from the American people — evidence demonstrating his disregard for the rule of law, his cruelty on Jan. 6 and the deep flaws in character that make him unfit to serve as president. The Supreme Court should understand this reality and conclude without delay that no immunity applies here.

Today, the Court is hearing arguments in Grants Pass v Johnson, which involves a longstanding principle of American law: In order to break the law, you have to do something, not just be a certain kind of person.

The issue here is homelessness. Grants Pass has such sweeping laws against sleeping in public that it is nearly impossible for a homeless person to live there and stay within the law. On the one hand, it seems like it shouldn’t be illegal simply to be homeless. On the other, municipalities want to have some way to regulate homeless encampments, which can be health hazards.

Wednesday, it’s time for Idaho v United States. Here the issue is a Reagan-era law known as the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, Emtala for short. Emtala requires emergency rooms to treat people who show up there (or risk losing Medicare and Medicaid funding).

The case was brought after Idaho imposed a near-total abortion ban that allowed doctors to perform an emergency abortion only if a pregnant patient was on the brink of death.

That law is in direct conflict with Emtala, which requires doctors to stabilize emergency patients so they won’t face severe health consequences – a radically lower bar for intervention than Idaho’s. Shortly after Roe was overturned, the Biden administration issued a guidance stating that the federal law pre-empts state abortion bans, ultimately suing Idaho over its ban.

So if a woman with a problem pregnancy shows up at an emergency room in Idaho, and isn’t at death’s door, but needs an abortion to, say, preserve her future fertility or prevent some problem that may lead to death in a week or two, what should happen?

These cases should all be decided by the end of the term in June.

and you also might be interested in …

Not content to simply waste its own time, the House Republican majority tried to waste the Senate’s time as well. The Senate refused.

The House had impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas essentially for policy differences. Ostensibly, he was charged with refusing to observe a 1952 law requiring applicants for asylum to be detained until a decision is reached — something no administration has done in recent years, largely because Congress hasn’t appropriated the money to do it. (One of the goals of the border bill that Trump torpedoed was to streamline the asylum process by funding more courts and judges.)

Once an impeachment has been voted by the House, the Senate is supposed to drop all its other business and hold a trial. Republicans were hoping for a grand show trial that would give them a stage to pontificate about border issues.

Democrats refused to play ball. In short order, a party-line vote (where Republican Lisa Murkowski voted Present rather than No) ended the trial because the bill of impeachment “does not allege conduct that rises to the level of a high crime or misdemeanor” as required in the Constitution.

Workers at a Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga overwhelmingly voted to join the United Auto Workers. The factory had rejected the union in 2014 and 2019, but this time the union held nearly a 3-1 majority. Historically, the South has not been welcoming to unions.

and let’s close with something spectacular

Two of nature’s most striking spectacles are the Northern Lights and a volcano erupting at night. In Iceland, you can sometimes get both.

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Defending American Values: Trial by Jury

April 22, 2024 – 8:52 am

If we can’t trust ordinary people to be jurors, then we’ve already given up on Democracy.

The central mission of a rising authoritarian movement is to destroy public trust in any institution that can stand in its way, and in particular, in any source of truth that is independent of the movement and its Leader. And so over the last few years the MAGA movement has told us that:

  • We can’t trust our public health institutions to guide us through a pandemic.
  • We can’t trust what climate scientists tell us about global warming.
  • We can’t trust the FDA’s opinion on the safety of abortion drugs.
  • We can’t trust historians to recount the story of American racism, or librarians to make sound decisions about books that discuss either race or sex.
  • We can’t trust women who tell us they were sexually assaulted, or any women at all to make decisions about their own pregnancies.
  • We can’t trust the news media to report simple facts (like the size of Trump’s inaugural crowd).
  • We can’t trust our secretaries of state and local election officials to count votes.
  • We can’t trust the FBI and the Department of Justice when they fail to find evidence of voting fraud.
  • We can’t trust our intelligence agencies when they tell us about Trump’s friend Vladimir Putin.
  • We can’t trust a judge of Mexican ancestry to oversee the Trump University fraud lawsuit, or any judges appointed by Democrats to handle Trump’s other trials.

And so on. Because in an authoritarian system, the Leader defines Truth. Only he can be trusted.

In each of these situations, we are presented with a Manichean choice: There is MAGA and there is the Deep State. There are Trump followers and Trump haters. If you are not one, you are the other — and that’s all that matters. No one can be trusted to simply do their job in a fact-based, objective, or professional manner.

This week we saw another example of that authoritarian trust-destroying mission: We can’t trust juries. Specifically, we can’t trust a jury of New Yorkers — or any jury convened in a blue state — to stand in judgment over the Great Leader himself. Most New Yorkers didn’t vote for Trump, and so by definition they are Trump haters who are incapable of listening to evidence and forming objective opinions about his guilt or innocence.

Already in August, Kellyanne (alternative facts) Conway was telling Fox News that Trump couldn’t get a fair trial in three of the four venues where he has been indicted — “the most liberal county in Georgia, D.C., New York City, all these places that voted against him”. Apparently only in south Florida, under the supervision of a judge he appointed himself, could Trump possibly get a fair shake. Because a courtroom is just another political arena where all that matters is the love or hate you feel for Donald Trump.

It’s important to push back on this insidious belief, because it strikes at the heart of any notion of Democracy. If ordinary people can’t be trusted, then they can’t be allowed to govern themselves. If they are too unreliable to be jurors, why should these same untrustworthy people be allowed to vote or protest or express themselves in any way at all? If ordinary people can only be trusted when they belong to the Leader’s party, then why let any other party compete for power?

There’s a reason that trial by jury goes back to the Magna Carta, and was guaranteed by the Founders in the Sixth Amendment. A belief in juries is fundamental to the whole project of Democracy.

Encouraging corruption. Once you convince yourself that an institution is inherently corrupt, the obvious next step is to make that corruption work for you rather than against you. So conservative talk-radio host Clay Travis made this plea to his listeners:

If you’re a Trump supporter in New York City who is a part of the jury pool, do everything you can to get seated on the jury and then refuse to convict as a matter of principle, dooming the case via hung jury. It’s the most patriotic thing you could possibly do.

In other words: Don’t answer the judge’s questions honestly, and once you get on the jury, don’t do your job with integrity. Don’t listen to the evidence and form an objective opinion. Refuse to convict “as a matter of principle”.

What principle would that be? That the Leader can do no wrong? That he is above the Law?

Rep. Byron Donalds (who a few months ago was in the running to be Speaker of the House) similarly denied that there was any need for jurors to listen to the prosecution’s case:

My plea is to the people of Manhattan that may sit on this trial: Please do the right thing for this country. Everybody’s allowed to have their political viewpoints, but the law is supposed to be blind and no respecter of persons. This is a trash case; there is no crime here; and if there is any potential for a verdict, they should vote not guilty.

But of course, there is a crime: falsification of business records, which is illegal in New York. Donalds knows this, just as he knows that Michael Cohen has already served time for his role in this illegal plot. If he truly believed Trump to be innocent, he could simply urge jurors to do their jobs with integrity, and express faith in the outcome. But he didn’t, did he?

Fox News has been doing its best to out the jurors, so that they can be vulnerable to intimidation and coercion from the violent MAGA faithful. In one case they have already succeeded: A juror who was seated on Tuesday came back Thursday asking to be excused because people had already begun to guess her identity. Fox host Jesse Watters had picked her out (by number) as a juror who might be difficult for Trump. (The evidence against her? She had blasphemed by saying: “No one is above the law.”) He then slandered (and Trump retweeted him) the jurors in general.

They are catching undercover Liberal Activists lying to the Judge in order to get on the Trump Jury.

In reality, Trump’s lawyers had caught people with liberal views saying that they could be objective. There is no reason to believe they can’t, beyond the dogma that all liberals are irrational Trump-haters.

In the face of this attack on a core democratic value, it’s important to reaffirm our faith in it, as Vox’ Abdallah Fayyad does:

Regardless of what the former president says, the demographics of New York or Washington, DC, won’t determine whether or not he will receive a fair trial. That will depend on how the prosecution makes its case, and whether the jurors will take their jobs seriously and evaluate the case on its merits rather than on their views of the defendant — something that juries are more than capable of doing.

That’s why Trump’s disingenuous attacks on the jury are dangerous: not because he’s questioning their potential fairness (juries can indeed be unfair, and defendants have the right to point that out), but because he’s broadly deeming some Americans — that is, anyone who doesn’t support him — as inherently illegitimate jurors.

If you believe in Democracy, the legitimacy of jurors doesn’t depend on who they voted for in 2020 or plan to vote for later this year or what they think of Donald Trump. Trials are not popularity contests. You can believe Trump is the scum of the Earth, and still evaluate fairly whether the prosecution has proved its case against him. As many a defense lawyer points out in summation: “You don’t have to like my client to find him not guilty.”

Could I be a juror? As I watched (from a distance) the Manhattan court’s effort to form a Trump jury, I did what I think a lot of people did: wondered how I would answer the questions prospective jurors were asked. In particular: Could I be objective? Could I listen to the evidence and arguments from both sides and reach a fair verdict?

I decided that I could. Now, as anyone who reads this blog or follows me on social media knows, I have a very strong negative opinion of Donald Trump. I have openly said that I think he’s guilty, not just in this case but in the other three cases as well. Had I been in that courtroom, the defense would undoubtedly have used one of their peremptory challenges to make sure I never came anywhere near the jury box. So how could I imagine being a fair juror?

Here’s how: I have a clear sense of the duties of a juror takes on. And the principle of trial by jury is more important to me than the fate of one man. Demagogues and grifters like Trump will come and go in American history, but trial by jury is something that I hope will endure through the centuries. I wouldn’t want to be part of screwing it up.

In particular, I believe that everyone accused of a crime deserves a fair trial, and that the prosecution has a responsibility to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. I also believe in the rules of evidence. As a juror, it wouldn’t matter to me what I had read in the news media or what I thought I remembered from the internet: The real evidence, the trustworthy evidence, isn’t what I heard on Fox News or MSNBC, it’s the evidence that shows up in court. And so when the trial ground to its conclusion, I would ask myself: Given what I’ve heard in court, has the prosecution proved its case? If it hadn’t, I would vote to acquit.

Now, I sincerely doubt that anything that might happen in this trial will change my opinion of Trump. At the end of the trial, I’m sure I will still believe he’s a fundamentally dishonest man who cares for no one but himself. I may even still believe that he’s guilty of the charges against him.

But if I’m a juror, that doesn’t matter. The question isn’t “Do you believe he’s guilty?” but “Has the prosecution proved he’s guilty.” If they haven’t, I could vote to acquit — even as I continued to hope that the prosecutors in one of his other cases would have more success.

Can this jury be fair? I have great faith that it can.

Part of my faith comes from having served on a jury several years ago in an emotionally fraught federal drug case. The defendant came from a household that in many ways exemplified the American dream: He and his wife were Hispanics who had worked their way into the middle class and were raising several children, all younger than 10. He worked in a local factory, and she was a nurse. The real bad guy here seemed to be the defendant’s brother, a career drug dealer that the government had been failing to make a case against. He sold drugs out of the defendant’s basement, and when the undercover cop showed up wanting to buy, he was too smart to sell. But the defendant trusted the cop, so the brother in essence said, “If you trust him, you sell to him.” The defendant did, and that was how he came to be on trial.

After the evidence was presented, we deliberated for an afternoon and most of the next morning. We were all over the map, and I had a very difficult night while I shouldered my responsibility. All of us sympathized with the wife and children. Several jurors who had been leaning not-guilty in the afternoon changed their minds overnight: By morning they were angry at the defendant for letting his brother sell drugs out of the house where his kids lived.

In the end, we answered the question we were given: Had the government proved that he sold the drugs? It had, and we convicted him. (We also had a meeting with the judge where we pleaded for him to sentence mercifully. I never checked whether he did.)

I learned a few things from this experience: First, the ritual of the court is powerful magic. You may come in with all sorts of impressions and opinions. But you very quickly learn to appreciate the awesomeness of the power you have been delegated and the responsibility it puts on you. (Spider-Man is right: With great power comes great responsibility.)

Second, no matter how different the individuals are, some kind of group loyalty develops. Not reaching a verdict feels like failure, and the jury doesn’t want to fail. We had each given a week of our time to this trial, and we didn’t want to believe our time had been wasted.

This is why I have faith in the Trump jury. Yes I can imagine all sorts of scenarios where somebody follows Clay Travis’ instructions: lies to the court so that they can get on the jury and rig the outcome. But that’s a harder mission to pull off than you might think.

My jury only met for a week. This one will probably sit for a month or more. During that time, they’ll share a lot of cups of coffee and more than a few lunches. They’re not supposed to discuss the trial until deliberation, but they’ll undoubtedly find other things to talk about: kids, jobs, the weather, TV shows. They’re going to see each other as people and develop a sense of common purpose.

Imagine spending that whole month with people while animated by a single malevolent thought: “I’m going to make sure you all fail. Because of me, this month we’ve all sacrificed will come to nothing.”

That would be a hard mission to carry out.

Even if you came onto the jury with a fairly strong belief in Trump, I think the ritual of the court and the camaraderie of the jury might well capture you. Every day you will look at Trump and realize that he is (as one prospective juror put it) “just a guy”, and not the great savior you imagined him to be. You will see him glower and bluster and doze off and treat you and your fellow jurors and the judge with disrespect. You will hear the prosecution witnesses assemble the case against him step by step. (You will have heard that the case is all politics, but in fact no one is talking politics. They’re presenting evidence.) When the defense takes its turn, you will hope for some grand revelation that shatters the prosecution’s case. And you will be disappointed.

During deliberation, you will have no real argument to make against your fellow jurors who want to convict. Over the month, you will have learned that they are not the frothing Trump-haters Fox News led you to expect. They’re just ordinary people trying to do their civic duty. Are you then going to look them all in the eye and admit that out of sheer stubbornness, you are going to make them fail?

Maybe. But I doubt it.

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