The Weekly Sift

This week the hole Donald Trump is in got deeper. And as he so often does, he did a lot of the digging himself. In his motion for a Trump-appointed judge to put an independent special master between the Department of Justice and the documents the FBI took from Mar-a-Lago under a search warrant, Trump’s lawyers included so much disinformation and outright falsehood that DoJ felt obligated to respond with a full history of their attempts to recover Trump’s stolen documents. The filing ended with an evidence photo of clearly labeled secret and top-secret documents spread across the floor in Mar-a-Lago and sitting next to one of the flimsy bankers’ boxes where these documents had been stored.

The photo was a holy-shit moment for me and just about anybody else who has ever had a security clearance. There’s no nuance here, no argument to be had about where to draw the line between legal and illegal: He knew he had the documents. He knew he had no right to them. And he lied to the government to keep them. One of the TV talking heads appropriately compared the situation to a drug bust: “If they find the heroin in your basement, you’re in trouble.”

But this week’s two featured posts aren’t about that. In “Fascist is a description, not an insult”, I talk about President Biden’s decision to publicly push back against the anti-democracy trends in the GOP, including labeling the MAGA Republicans as “semi-fascist”.

I started applying the F-word to Trump in 2015. At the time, I felt an obligation to define what I meant and why I thought the word applied, so that it wouldn’t just be another insult to throw at someone I didn’t like. Seven years later, I stand by my definition and my decision to call Trump a fascist. That article should be out shortly.

The second featured post doesn’t have a title yet, but it concerns the politics of abortion. The big shift that has happened after Dobbs is that Democrats have taken what I call the “advantage of fantasy” away from Republicans. The hypothetical cases at the center of the debate these days are ones that favor abortion rights. (What if your 12-year-old gets pregnant from a rape?) Sooner or later, Republicans will try to take that advantage back. (What if some perfectly healthy woman wants to abort a perfectly healthy fetus moments before birth?) How should the argument go then?

That still needs work, so don’t expect to see it before 11 EDT.

That leaves a lot for the weekly summary to cover: the Trump stuff, the water problem in Jackson, CNN’s apparent desire to move to the right, a biography of a great American you probably haven’t heard of, and a few other things. And it’s not just Labor Day, it’s Labor Day falling on 9-5, which means we have to hear from Dolly Parton.

As Lloyd Bridges says in Airplane, “I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.” After taking last week off, I now have the whole Mar-a-Lago FBI search controversy to cover, together with the capstone of President Biden’s legislative agenda, the Inflation Reduction Act.

Those two stories make interesting bookends, because they show what each party has become. Democrats are focused on passing laws that improve people’s lives and safeguard their future. Republicans’ top priority is protecting Donald Trump against any form of accountability, no matter what he has done or how absurd his defenses are. I’ll make that case in “Governing Party vs. Personality Cult”, which should be out by 10 or so EDT.

That leaves a lot for the weekly summary to cover: Republicans candidates are doubling down on unpopular positions, and voters are starting to notice. The pandemic might be letting up again. The beginning of the school year highlights right-wing meddling with public education. The one-year anniversary of Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan is coming up. Women appear to be raising their dating standards. And a few other things have been happening. The summary should appear between noon and 1.

When you consider how much power the Constitution theoretically gives Congress, it’s amazing how seldom that body is the focus of our national political conversation. When we do talk about Congress, it’s usually because Congress is investigating somebody else (as in the 1-6 hearings) or because it’s taking some symbolic vote that won’t actually change anything (like all the progressive legislation that gets through the House but predictably dies in the Senate).

This week, though, the focus was on Congress legislating, believe it or not. The CHIPs bill passed. Joe Manchin finally agreed to a climate reconciliation bill, which now is all lined up to pass (assuming Kyrsten Sinema doesn’t torpedo it). And a bill that looked like a slam dunk, the PACT Act to provide healthcare to veterans suffering the effects of toxic burn pit fumes, unexpectedly got blocked by Republicans in the Senate — apparently as a temper tantrum about the Manchin-Schumer deal. That was a huge self-inflicted wound on the GOP, and I think the pressure to reverse it will be irresistible once the August recess ends.

The opportunity to focus on meaningful legislation is so novel that I have to make that the featured post this week. “A Week When Congress Mattered” should appear around 10 or so EDT.

The weekly summary will also cover tomorrow’s primaries, including the referendum on abortion in Kansas. Also, why I think the newly announced centrist Forward Party is doomed. With the 1-6 Committee in recess, attention has shifted to the DoJ’s investigation, which might be aiming higher than it has sometimes appeared. WNBA star Britteny Griner is still on trial in Russia, and NBA legend Bill Russell died at the age of 89. How the Right’s tactics for avoiding the unfortunate results of their abortion policies resemble their tactics for avoiding the unfortunate results of their gun policy. Plus a few other things. I’ll aim to get that out around noon.

This week we were all talking about a girl whose name none of us know: the pregnant 10-year-old who was denied an abortion in Ohio and had to go to Indiana. Maybe years from now she’ll decide to tell her story, but until then I hope we never know her name.

She was significant because she became a symbol of the fact that abortion decisions are not as simple as the Mike Pences and Kristi Noems would have you believe. Each story of a woman or girl who is pregnant but doesn’t want to become a mother is unique. Any one-size-fits-all decision made by a legislature is going to lead to outcomes we can all recognize as wrong — like forcing a 10-year-old to carry her rapist’s baby.

The aspect of the story most interesting to me, though, was watching how right-wing media handled the story, because the girl’s existence called into question one of the false assumptions central to the right-wing narrative: Right and Wrong are simple concepts, and it’s easy to draw the line between them.

For that reason, the story had to be short-circuited somehow: swept under the rug, denied, or diverted into some other story. That’s what I examine in the featured post “No Victims Allowed”, which should be out shortly.

The weekly summary will cover new developments in the 1-6 hearings and related investigations, the new Covid surge, the Uvalde shooting report, the continuing aftershocks of the Court’s reversal of Roe, and a few other things, before closing with some of the most spectacular photos ever, courtesy of the James Webb space telescope. That should be out noonish, EDT.

It’s the Fourth of July, and I don’t think I have ever been less excited to be an American.

Anyway, it was an eventful week. Tuesday was Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony to the 1-6 Committee, which was really our first view inside the Trump White House. Her testimony damaged both Trump’s legal defenses and his public image. I’ll describe that in the featured post, which should be out shortly.

Last week I covered three major Supreme Court decisions: the reversal of Roe, tossing out New York’s gun law, and forcing Maine to subsidize religious schools. All of them were major steps backwards for America, and are a big part of why this Independence Day feels so dismal. This week the march towards Gilead continued: a public school football coach can lead students in public prayer during a school event, and the EPA has lost a tool for fighting climate change. I’ve decided not to go into as much detail about these, and to cover them in the weekly summary.

Also in the summary: Both sides continue to react and respond to the Court’s Roe reversal. Russia is slowly advancing in eastern Ukraine. Most of the worst candidates in Tuesday’s primary elections lost. And Covid looks set to take off again after the holiday weekend.

I have an unexpected meeting this morning, so I don’t know when I’ll get the summary out. I’ll aim for noon, but who knows?